to the southward could he but keep submerged; but the water, spurting through the buckled plating and rivets started by the bursting depth{74} charges, had mingled with the acid in the batteries and generated poison gas, which drove him to the surface. Here he turned, a couple of miles astern of his pursuers, and manned both guns, a hunted vermin at bay. As his foremost gun opened fire, a heavy shell burst a few yards abeam of the submarine, and the captain of the nearest motor launch raised his glasses. It was not a shell fired from a motor launch.

{74}

“The destroyers,” he said. “Now why couldn’t they have kept away till we’d made a job of it?” On the horizon the masts and funnels of a flotilla of destroyers appeared in line abreast, approaching at full speed, firing as they came. The next instant a shell from the submarine burst on the tiny forecastle of the launch, shattering the gun, gun’s crew, and wheelhouse. The coxswain dropped over the wrecked wheel and slowly slid to the deck like a marionette suddenly deprived of animation. The lieutenant R.N.V.R. who had once been a stockbroker stood upright for an instant with his hands to his throat as if trying to stem the red torrent spurting through his fingers, and then pitched brokenly beside the coxswain.

The captain of the submarine counted the approaching destroyers, opened the seacock to speed the flooding of his doomed craft, gave{75} a swift glance overhead at the Blimp swooping towards them for the coup-de-grâce, and ordered Cease Fire. Then he waved his hands in token of surrender.

{75}

V. Overdue

Overdue

The thin light of a sickle moon tipped the crest of each swift-running sea with silver. The rest was a purple blackness, through which the north wind slashed like a knife, and the sound of surf on a distant shoal was carried moaning. At intervals a bank of racing clouds trailed across the face of the moon, and then all was inky dark for a while.

It was during one of these periods of obliteration of all things visible that a slender, perpendicular object rose above the surface of the sea. Gradually the dim light waxed again: a wave, cloven in its path, passed hissing on either side in a trail of spray, and the object slowly projected until it topped the highest wave. Presently about its base a convulsive disturbance in the water was followed by the appearance of a conical shape, a solid blackness against the streaked glimmering 

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