Late on the following afternoon, Mark Redisham and Darby Catchpole were at the naval base, waiting for instructions, when a flotilla of mine-sweepers came into the harbour. One of them was the Mignonette. As she came alongside the quay, Mark and Darby saw two very bedraggled young men in shabby naval uniform standing with the skipper abaft the wheel-house.
"They look like German prisoners," Mark said below his breath.
"They've been in the water," added Darby, "picked up from a sinking submarine, I dare say. There's Ned Quester. Let's ask him about them."
Ned was climbing along the port bulwark, dragging the end of a heavy mooring-rope. Having secured it round a bollard, he turned and saw the two Sea Scouts.
"See those two chaps down there?" he began. "They're Deutschers. They look rather sad, don't they? We rescued them early this morning, this side of the Dogger. Just before dawn, we saw two rockets go up—a red and a blue. We made for the place, thinking it was a vessel in distress. So it was, but not the sort of vessel we expected. It looked like an immense dead whale, seen in the dim light. When we got nearer we were still puzzled by the shape of it, and could only guess that it was a wrecked airship."
"What?" cried Mark Redisham, "a Zeppelin?—the Zeppelin that was over Haddisport last night, dropping bombs? Then the anti-aircraft gun must have hit it, after all!"
"That's right," nodded Ned. "Major Proudfynski—that's the older of the two, who speaks English, of a sort—told us that they had done heaps of damage, and killed he didn't know how many people, and that a whole battery of artillery had fired up at them. Of course, we knew he was exaggerating. However, when we got out the boat and pulled alongside the thing, we knew it could only be a Zep that had come to grief. One of the propellers was above water. We could see some of the bent and tangled framework, supported by a section of the still inflated gas-bag. Afterwards we fired a shot into it, letting the gas escape, and then the wreckage went down. But before that, we'd seen these two chaps clinging to the framework, and we got them off and took them aboard the Mignonette. They were so exhausted by the exposure that they couldn't speak, and the younger one had to be worked at for a long time before he came to his senses."
"But there must have been a whole crowd of others," said Mark. "Those Zeps have a crew of thirty or forty at least."
"Yes, I know," returned Ned. "The rest were all drowned under the wreckage. These two had the sense to jump out when she was falling and get clear of the stays. They could swim. What puzzled our skipper was how they managed to send up the two rockets. But it seems the airship fell by the bow with her stern sticking up above water for a time, and the major got into one of the gondolas, where there was a box of rockets and things—matches, as well, I suppose."
Officers from the naval station had come to the edge of the wharf. One of them spoke to the Germans, asking them to come ashore.