"Hooray!" cried the young captain with heartfelt sincerity; "then I'll get out to-night. You know the captain told me that if it got any worse, he'd hold me till to-morrow morning. I told him I'd rather go out to-night. Perfect cinch once you get to the mouth of the bay; all you have to do is submerge and take it easy. What do you think of the news? Smithie thinks he saw a Hun yesterday. Got anything good to read? Somebody's pinched that magazine I was reading. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—that ought to be enough handkerchiefs. Hello, there goes the juice!"
The humming of the dynamo was dying away slowly, fading with an effect of lengthening distance. The guitar orchestra, as if to celebrate its deliverance, burst into a triumphant rendering of Sousa's "Stars and Stripes."
My guide and I waited till after midnight to watch the going of Branch's Z-5. Branch and his second, stuffed into black oilskins down whose gleaming surface ran beaded drops of rain, stood on the bridge; a number of sailors were busy doing various things along the deck. The electric lights shone in all their calm unearthly brilliance. Then slowly, very slowly, the Z-5 began to gather headway, the clear water seemed to flow past her green sides, and she rode out of the pool of light into the darkness waiting close at hand.
"Good-bye! Good luck!" we cried.
A vagrant shower came roaring down into the shining pool.
"Good-bye!" cried voices through the night.
The submarines disappear in the dark.
Three minutes later all trace of the Z-5 had disappeared in the dark.
Night and day are the same on a submarine.
Captain Bill of the Z-3 was out on patrol. His vessel was running submerged. The air within—they had but recently dived—was new and sweet; and that raw cold which eats into submerged submarines had not begun to take the joy out of life. It was the third day out; the time, five o'clock in the afternoon. The outer world, however, did not penetrate into the submarine. Night or day, on the surface or submerged, only one time, a kind of motionless electric high noon, existed within those concave walls of gleaming cream-white enamel.