Less than an hour afterwards two British destroyers were seen racing at top speed in the direction in which the enemy trawler had disappeared. They went out of sight. There came the sound of gun firing, and Mark afterwards heard that the trawler had been sunk and her German crew taken prisoners.
While the guns were firing and the Dainty was yet within sight of the drifters, Mark again saw the submarine, or, rather, he saw her periscopes moving above the surface about a mile away. At the same time the skipper was watching a confused cloud of black smoke through the rain mist on the western horizon.
"Looks like a big liner," Snowling conjectured. "Give her a signal that there's an enemy submarine prowlin' around."
Before going to his instrument room Mark looked searchingly at the smoke.
"That's not a liner," he decided. "There's too much smoke for a liner. And there's more than one. It looks like a patrol of cruisers."
He sent off his wireless message and got one back to say that it had been received and understood. On returning to the deck he searched for signs of the submarine, but found none. The funnels of three British cruisers were now visible above the line of the sea. The Dainty was steered towards them. When their turrets and hulls came into view, Mark succeeded in identifying the ships as the armoured cruisers Pomona, Graemsay, and Ronaldsay. They were followed by a light cruiser and a division of destroyers. He signalled to them:
"Keep to the eastward of the fishing fleet."
But his warning advice did not divert the warships from their course. They approached at easy speed in line-ahead formation, the Pomona leading.
"They're all right, don't you trouble," observed Skipper Snowling. "I expect that that submarine has made off to Heligoland. They're all of 'em afraid of the very sight of the White Ensign."
The great, three-funnelled cruisers were a noble sight as they steamed along so steadily. Mark Redisham watched them through his binoculars, paying his attention to each one in turn and trying to discover in what small details of structure they differed one from another; for they were all three of the same class. Each was of twelve thousand tons displacement, each carried the same number of heavy guns, and each, as he knew, had the same complement of seven hundred and fifty officers and men.