"It's pretty feeble, but I think I follow you," answered Trent. "Only you seem to have forgotten one thing, which is that as soon as the fog lifts and the skipper spots your barrel he'll pot it with his quick-firer. Then we shall read a hair-raising account of how the captain of the Cotswold sank a U boat which had been following her all night."
"Not a bit of it, my son. They won't be able to hit that barrel in a month of Sundays, especially if we get a choppy sea by the morning."
Trent shrugged his shoulders, but made no further comment.
"And now," went on Lawless cheerfully, "it's time the plot thickened, so we'll proceed to drop the bean in the soup. Stand by the telegraph, for if we run our nose against the other fellow's counter the joke'll be on us."
He leant over the bridge-rail and peered through the fog for the steamer, but, though he could hear the latter's engines, the vessel herself was invisible. The manœuvre he proposed carrying out was, to put it mildly, risky, and no one but the feckless Lieutenant would have contemplated such a thing, much less have attempted to put it into execution. But no fear of possible consequences ruffled his serenity as, little by little, the Knat cautiously overhauled the Cotswold, the noise of whose machinery completely drowned the hum of the destroyer's turbines.
Some ten minutes elapsed, and then Lawless was able to make out the vessel's stern towering, dim and shadowy, above him. Then, taking the wheel from the hands of the quartermaster, he brought the Knat's bows right under the steamer's counter.
"Let her go," he said in a hoarse whisper.
The bos'n, who was balancing himself on the companion-ladder, sprang to the deck and, picking up the line attached to the barrel, ran with it on to the fo'c'sle head. Leaning as far over as he could he pitched the lump of lead, to which the other end of the line was fastened, against the Cotswold's stern-post in such a manner that it would fall over one of the iron supports extending from beneath the counter to the rudder-post. There was, of course, the danger of its being caught in the propellers, but he had to risk that. As it happened, the cast was successful, whereupon the bos'n called softly to a sailor, who at once flung the barrel into the sea, together with the slack line.
"All clear, sir," the bos'n reported to Lawless.
The latter rang down "half-speed astern," the Knat backed away into the fog, and the steamer was blotted out.