No one knew. The enemy had ceased fire, but when he did so none of the late M.L.'s crew could say. In the excitement of abandoning ship, the fact that they were under shell-fire hardly concerned them.
"Pushing off at the rate of knots, he is," hazarded another. "Unless we've given him gyp. P'raps he's been knocked out, same as us."
"Shouldn't be surprised," remarked Clarkson, the gun-layer. "I'll swear I got half a dozen home in his hide before the fog came on again. Otherwise he'd be sniffing around and giving us a dose of machine-gun fire. That's Fritz's little joke when a fellow can't hit back. If——"
A terrific roar caused the man to break off suddenly. Somewhere within the radius of a mile, although the now increasing fog gave no indication of direction, an explosion of no slight magnitude had occurred. For nearly a minute came the sound of falling debris, and then deep silence.
"Is that Fritz or us?" inquired one of the men, as the rowers resumed their task.
"How far is it to Auldhaig?" asked another. "Lucky for us we aren't in the ditch. 'Twould be a longish swim."
Wakefield let the men talk. It helped to keep up their spirits, although they were not apt to be down-hearted. For his part, he was kept busily employed in steering the boat by means of a small compass that was little better than a toy. By a fortunate chance, he had found it with a miscellaneous assortment of small articles in the inside pocket of his monkey-jacket. A fortnight previously he had been induced by an attractive damsel at a bazaar in aid of the Auldhaig Seamen and Fishermen's Society to buy what then occurred to him to be an utterly useless article, but now he found himself trusting implicitly to the doubtless highly erratic magnetised needle. It was a sorry substitute for the boat-compass that ought to have been in the boat, but wasn't; but even in the baffling fog Wakefield knew that he was provided with a means of direction. With reasonable luck, the boat ought to hit the Scottish coast somewhere, if the survivors were not picked up by one of the other patrol-boats known to be cruising in the vicinity.
At frequent intervals Wakefield bade the men rest on their oars, taking advantage of the silence to listen for sounds indicating the presence of other craft; but beyond the lap of the water against the metal sides of the boat the stillness was unbroken.
It was an eerie experience, climbing the slope of the long rollers and sliding down into the trough beyond, the while encompassed by a fog now so dense that at twenty yards sea and air blended into nothingness. Fortunately there was little or no wind, and the boat rode the swell without shipping as much as a pailful of water, but both Wakefield and Meredith knew full well that those sullen rollers portended a storm at no distant date. The while the pale rays of the moon penetrated with little difficulty the relatively thin stratum of fog overhead, the ghostly light adding to the weirdness of the scene.
"Prop.!" exclaimed Kenneth laconically.