"Bout time the old Triadur showed up sir," remarked the bluejacket. "Sure I won't forget to-night, an' it's me birthday. You all right, sir?" he added anxiously.
"Quite," replied Alec untruthfully, but with a dogged determination to refuse to acknowledge that things were not going at all well with him. An ominous numbing sensation in his arms and legs told him plainly and unmistakably that the icy cold water was beginning to take effect.
Almost directly after he had given his assurance, Alec relaxed his grasp of the beaker and without an effort disappeared beneath the surface.
CHAPTER V
In the Whaler
Count Otto von Brockdorff-Giespert's feelings were far from comfortable when the crash of the Bolero's quick-firers told him unmistakably that the destroyer was in action.
With his broken collar-bone and other injuries he was practically helpless, while to make matters worse, as far as he was concerned, his captors had put him under lock and key. Evidently these English meant to take no risks, he soliloquized.
It was no exaggeration to state that he was in a blue funk. At one moment he cursed the German vessel for replying to the British destroyer's fire; at another he hoped and prayed that the former would draw out of range. Not once did he express a wish that the Black Cross Ensign might prove victorious.
With the perspiration oozing in large beads on his bullet forehead he lay and quaked, his mind torn with agitated thoughts. He remembered vividly—the reminiscence was frequently in his mind—how on one occasion, when he was in command of a U-boat, he had taken out of a badly-damaged boat an old, white-haired British merchant skipper. It was not by reason of the call of humanity that he had done this: it was part of a cool, calculated plan of action whereby the Huns vainly thought that, with British captains and engineers detained on board the submarines as hostages, the hunters would hesitate to sink the modern pirates. It was but one of the many instances in which the Hun miscalculated the spirit of Britain. Von Brockdorff-Giespert's submarine was being chased by a particularly aggressive P-boat. A depth charge was exploded so near that the hunted U-boat reeled and quivered under the shock. By sheer good luck Count Otto's command escaped, and the Hun commander lost no time in taunting his captive.
"Are you not glad you weren't blown up by your fellow-countrymen?" he asked.