Madden removed his binoculars and stared at his friend. "Are you staking your life on as long a chance as that?"
"My boy," said Smith, in an oddly matured tone, "when the safety of one's country is at stake, one man's life doesn't amount to that!" he snapped his fingers. "If there's a point to be gained, you accept any chance automatically—or no chance at all."
The American returned no answer, but there flashed into his mind the legend of the Tyrian who beached his galley in order to save the secret of Cornwall. Caradoc's narrative was oddly prophetic of the fate of the Vulcan. And Madden wondered with a quirk of grim humor if there were a foreigner aboard that Tyrian's galley, and what he thought about the sacrifice.
There was another jagged report as a shell burst just aft the tug, then a missile of some thousands of pounds shrieked through the air just above the stumpy masts and filled the sky with fire and thunder a hundred yards ahead.
Out of the cabin came the rocket bearers, quite over their fright by now, and acting with the nervous steadiness which acute danger brings. One of the sailors from the regular crew of the tug moved along the rail, mounting the fire signals one after the other for shooting. Immediately behind him came Hogan, using his one good hand to fish matches from his watch pocket and light the fuses.
The first rocket lit with a sputter, for a moment its fiery blowing filled the deck with smoke, then it darted skyward, with a tremendous swis-s-sh! Up, in a long black column it went, into the very heart of the hot brazen sky, then it exploded with a faint pop, and a black head of smoke expanded at a prodigious height. In the midst of the smoke-filled deck, Hogan was applying his match to another. So as the tug plowed forward, tall slender pillars of smoke, crowned with swelling palm-like heads, arose to dizzy heights out of her path.
By this time huge shells were bursting about the Vulcan with crashing monotony. Sometimes the dodging little vessel ran through the pungent gases of the shells that were sent to destroy her. Now and then the giant missiles exploded under water and sent furious waterspouts leaping over her decks. Something touched the top of her steel mainmast and snapped it off as if it were a straw. A few minutes later the crew had cleared the union jack from the wreckage and had it flaunting defiantly from the forepeak.
It was an odd defiance, a tugboat's challenge to a German battle line. The nibbling of a mouse once set a lion free. Here was a mouse endeavoring to net a whole herd of lions.
The cruisers did not overhaul the little vessel as rapidly as Madden had anticipated. The Vulcan skurried through the seaweed fields, dodging this way and that in order to take advantage of every lane of open water, but the unwieldy battleships could not accept small advantages, and were forced to plow straight ahead, through weed or wave as it came.
Thus the cruisers still fired at extreme range, and the tug escaped destruction as a gnat might jiggle between raindrops and survive a summer's shower.