"I don't know, I tell you. He says to me, 'I'll attend to the course,' and he may have put her round. But I've got a notion he's carrying out his orders. I see now why I got six months' pay. Did you?"
"No, I got a note on the captain, same as usual," said Mr. Cassar.
"What do you think they will do with us?" pursued Mr. Spokesly.
"I don't know, Mister Mate. There's always plenty o' work everywhere," was the equable reply.
"Is that all you think of?"
"I got a big family in Cospicua," said the engineer, standing up. "I can't afford to be out of a job. I think I'll go and eat, Mister Mate. Perhaps the fog will lift a bit and we can see what the course is."
They went out and climbed the ladder to the bridge-deck, and stood staring into the damp, palpable darkness. The absence of all artificial light, the silence, the tangible vapour concealing the surface of the sea, and possibly, too, the over-hanging uncertainty of their destination, combined to fill them with a vague dull sense of impending peril. They were on the starboard side, abaft the lifeboat. They could not see the bridge clearly, and the forecastle was swallowed up in the blank opacity of the mist. It was a situation in which both care and recklessness were of equal futility. The imagination balked and turned back on itself before the contemplation of such limitless possibilities. And it was while they were standing there in taciturn apprehension that they suddenly sprang into an extraordinary animation of mind and body at the sound and vibration of a loud crash forward. The Kalkis heeled over to port from the pressure of some invisible weight and Mr. Spokesly started to run towards the bridge.
"They're shellin' her!" he bawled. "Stand by! Look out! What's that?"
He stood still for a moment, his hands raised to balance himself against the returning roll of the ship as she recovered. And in that moment, out of the fog, above him and over the rail, came an immense gray vertical wall of sharp steel rushing up to him and past into oblivion with a grinding splintering roar. There were cries, the dim glow of an opened door high up, the sough of pouring waters in the darkness, a shadowy phantom and a swirl of propellers, and she was gone.
And there was an absolute silence on the Kalkis more dreadful to Mr. Spokesly than the panic of the mob of Asiatics on the Tanganyika. He tried to think. Mr. Cassar had disappeared. They had been in collision with a man-of-war, he felt certain of that. There was no mistaking the high cleaving flare of those gray bows as they fled past. And she must have struck the Kalkis forward as well as amidships. A glancing blow. Yet there was silence. He strode forward and climbed the ladder to the bridge.