“So we are, you chump. Where do you think Queenstown is?”

“France, of course! Isn’t it?”

There was a laugh at that, and he was informed that unless Ireland had had another Big Wind Queenstown was still across the Channel from France. Nelson began to feel squirmy after awhile and, seeing that Martin was half-asleep, propped up against the bunk frame, he unobtrusively picked his way through the crowd, aware of surreptitious smiles, and made his way back to his bunk, narrowly missing a collision with the junior lieutenant on the way.

The next few hours were most unhappy ones for Nelson. He was just sick enough to be miserable, and for a long time his efforts to get to sleep were vain. He finally fell into a restless slumber, however, from which he was later awakened by a swirling and rushing of water beneath him, followed after a minute by a gurgling sound that proclaimed the main tanks filled. He waited for the engines to stop their racket, but, waiting, he fell asleep again, and when he next awoke the silence was for a moment quite startling.

“Down again,” he murmured comfortably. “Fine! Nice and quiet!”

Then he really and truly went to sleep.

CHAPTER XIV
IN AN IRISH MIST

The Q-4 slid down a long foam-patterned wave that hid the horizon behind, wallowed a moment in the green hollow and began her climb once more. Those seas were awe-inspiring, and Nelson, viewing them from a conning tower port, felt that the submarine was a ridiculously tiny thing to be afloat in. Even Martin, who had preceded him up the ladder, looked a bit serious as he raised his eyes to the crest of the next monster that came, towering far against a stormy gray sky, toward them as if to engulf the little craft. But the Q-4 kept on climbing, her decks aslant, until she seemed to hang motionless there between sky and water. Then, with a flirt of her tail, she was off again, coasting down for another wallow in the trough.

She had been doing that ever since the evening before when the peaceful quiet of the hundred foot depth had given place to the clatter and clang of surface steaming. The gale was a thing of the past, but the effect of it was still apparent in the monstrous seas that came charging out of the north-east. Once during the forenoon the sun had peered out for a brief moment from behind the wrack of leaden clouds, but now the world visible from the Q-4 was gray and somber slatey-green. The other ships were not in sight, for each had fought the gale in its own way and set its own course, but the wireless had picked up one of the destroyers the night before. She had had her bow bent by a sea and lost a funnel, but was keeping on about sixty miles north. Later the Q-4 got into communication with the flagship and with two submarines. Each reported having had a hard time of it. One of the smaller subs was believed to have been lost. (That, however, as they were to learn weeks later, was not so. She had submerged early in the trouble, but her batteries had been quickly exhausted and she had been forced to the surface again where for two days she had been tossed about and driven so far from her course that, engine trouble developing, she had limped in to Bermuda, by that time her nearest port!) The Q-4 was doing eleven knots and had been putting the miles behind her at that speed ever since coming up, and, with the barometer acting reasonably there seemed a fair chance of reaching Queenstown in the course of another three days, for the Q-4 had also got too far south.