Early on the next morning, Mark Redisham started up in his bunk, hearing the engines coming to a dead stop. He dressed himself in his oilskins and went out upon the rain-splashed deck. To his surprise he saw that a submarine had come close alongside. It was the H29, of which, as he remembered, his friend, Lieutenant Ingoldsby, was the commanding officer. One of her crew had been taken ill, and Lieutenant Ingoldsby wished the Dainty to take the man on board and nurse him until he could be put ashore in Haddisport.
The sick man had been carried over a gangway thrown across between the two vessels when Mark, happening to glance over the Dainty's farther bulwark, in search of the rest of the squadron which had gone on in advance, saw instead the dim shape of a three-funnelled cruiser looming ghostlike through the rain mist. She was flying no ensign, but by the look of her he was almost sure she was not British.
Not asking himself why he did so, he strode across the gangway to where Lieutenant Ingoldsby knelt, doing something with a spanner, on the narrow deck abaft the conning-tower.
"Good-morning, sir," he began. "I think the cruiser over there is signalling."
"Cruiser?" repeated Lieutenant Ingoldsby, springing to his feet. He climbed a few rungs up the ladder of the conning-tower, and looked out over the wheel-house of the Dainty, behind which the submarine was well hidden.
"Just slip below and ask Jardine for my glasses, Redisham," he ordered. "I believe it's the Schwalbe—the ship we've been stalking! In fact, I'm sure!"
Mark had never before been on board a submarine, and when he got to the foot of the perpendicular ladder of the hatchway, he became confused by the strange complexity of tanks and machinery. An electric light shone in the far end of a narrow passage. He was making his difficult way towards it when the great boom of a naval gun startled him. The Schwalbe was opening fire on the mine-sweepers.
He stood still. The silence following the gun shot was broken by the banging of an iron door above his head, and the sharply-spoken command rang out in Lieutenant Ingoldsby's voice:
"Prepare to dive!"
CHAPTER VIII.