The engineer did his best, and the deck-plates of the O47 vibrated with the ponderous thumping of the machinery below. Chard leaned out of the wheelhouse with his binoculars glued to the missing prize, calling down maledictions upon himself and all his kin if he failed to lay her by the heels. But the Gelderland was making off as fast as her engines would carry her, and there ensued a long and stern chase which lasted until the O47 was near enough to send a shot crashing through the Gelderland's chart-room. Then, and not till then, the Gelderland hove to.
"You'll be hanged for this, you ravin' lunatic!" shouted Chard as he boarded the recaptured prize; and then, as the Lieutenant, descending from the bridge, smiled in a sickly sort of fashion, he added: "You've been guilty of barratry, piracy, mutiny, and heaven knows what!"
Lawless was told to regard himself as a prisoner, and then the skipper, pursuing his investigations, was amazed to find some score of Germans in the hold, all of them belonging to the submarine service.
"Why—why, what the deuce does this mean?" he demanded.
"I had to sling some of the cargo overboard," answered the other apologetically, "or there wouldn't have been room for these chaps."
"But how the blazes did they get here?"
Then Lawless related his adventures since the stormy night when he was placed in charge of the Gelderland. He had argued that, if one enemy submarine had been deceived by the supply vessel, others might also be lured to destruction in the same way, and his argument had proved correct.
"I suppose I've been guilty of disobedience," he concluded, "but I've bagged four U boats, ramming one and sinking three with the gun we found in the hold. Most of the men in the submarines foundered with them, but we've managed to save about twenty. At first I wondered how they managed to identify the Gelderland in the dark, but I tumbled to it the first night. The masthead light, instead of being on the foremast, was hung on the aftermast, and this, I suppose, was a pre-arranged signal. At any rate, I didn't alter it, and the scheme seemed to work."
"If you're not shot, you'll be made a blessed admiral!" the skipper remarked.
The court-martial which followed absolved the Lieutenant from the formal charges with which he had been indicted, and a few days later he was informed that, the Knat having arrived at Devonport, he was to return to her with rank of Lieutenant-Commander. And that evening Lawless, in the gladness of his heart, took from its case a battered banjo, and, lifting up his voice in song, declared in inharmonious accents that "Somewhere the sun is shining."