"S'elp me," exclaimed one of the men. "We'd got a blanked U-boat blazing away at us like mad. 'Course we didn't reply, an' they didn't 'arf give us a dustin'. Then up comes another of the swine an' starts firin', only 'er shells goes wide. Still our owner sticks it without so much as winkin'. Hopin', you see, to bag 'em both."
"And did 'e?" inquired another.
"Not 'e, worse luck," replied the other. "Just as we was about ter drop our false bulwarks an' give 'em perishin' socks, one of the U-boats slipped in a couple o' tawpedas into t'other an' blew 'er to blazes."
"Wot for?" asked a bearded petty officer.
"Wot for?" snorted the other. "To do us out of our bloomin' prize money, of course. There was we, with our decks littered with sheep and cattle, stickin' it for four mortal hours in the hope we'd put it abaft the swine, an' all for nothin'. The U-boat was one of our own mystery ships, rigged up to bamboozle Fritz. She was orf right into Heligoland Bight to do 'er dirty work, if I remember right."
Von Preussen chuckled inwardly. Here indeed was a "scoop." Before eight that evening the information, transmitted in the form of an apparently genuine business telegram to a firm in Amsterdam, was in the hands of the German Admiralty.
CHAPTER XVII
MUTINY
"Hans!" whispered Seaman Kaspar Krauss of U 247. "Do you know what our swine-headed kapitan has made up his mind to do?"