"And to-morrow," remarked Stirling to his chum—"to-morrow we will redeem these."
And he held out Kapitan von Riesser's receipt for the gold that he had taken from the three subs when they were captured on the Nichi Maru.
CHAPTER XXIII
How the Pelikan Surrendered
As soon as darkness set in the monitors switched on their searchlights, the Crustacean, which was farthest up-stream, training her projectors on the channel in the direction of the distant Pelikan, while the Paradox swept both banks with her powerful beams. In the lagoon the Eureka and the Simplicita directed their searchlights upon the shore.
About one bell in the middle watch the look-out on the Crustacean noticed two dark objects drifting down-stream. At first he thought them to be a pair of hippopotami, but as their relative distance seemed constant and there was no sign of propulsion, he reported the matter to the officer of the watch.
"It's only a part of the boom, smashed by our shell fire," he remarked casually. "We'll get a lot of wreckage down with the ebb-tide."
Nevertheless he gave orders for the helm to be starboarded. The monitor, sheering to port under the force of the current until her cable was hard athwart her stem, missed the barrels, for such they were, by a good twenty yards. Steadily they drifted by, eventually stranding in the mud at a distance of two hundred yards from the Paradox. In half an hour they were high and dry, lying directly in the rays of the larger monitor's searchlight.
Twenty minutes later another pair of barrels came drifting down. The officer of the watch of the Crustacean executed a similar manoeuvre, but before the monitor sheered out of the track of the derelicts, the barrels were hung up one on either side of the bows.