esponsively. Then the green and red starboard and port lamps and
lights in wardroom and galley went out and men hurried along the deck
placing tarpaulins over the engine room gratings. Only the binnacle
lights remained and these were muffled with just a crack for the
helmsman to peer through.

A great blackness settled over the waters. To Anne, always an
impressionable girl, it was as though all life had suddenly been
obliterated from the face of them. Her hand tightened its grasp on
Sara's fingers, for as the vessel plunged along there was a palpable
impression that the flotilla, now hurrying forward in viewless haste,
was pitched for the supreme test. Off to the seaward signal lights
from the parent ship _Racine_, having on board the officer in charge of
the Navy's mobile defences--which is to say, torpedo boats--had flared
and died. The battleships were approaching.

Anne, quivering with excitement, peered out through the night; nothing
but darkness. Below, lined along the rails, she caught dull outlines
of the white caps of the seamen, all as eager to defeat the battleships
as their officers. She saw the phosphorescent gleam from a shattered
wave. But she heard nothing, not even the swish of water.

Johnson approached diffidently, and leaned over the rail at their side,
straining his eyes into the night.

"The chances of making a successful attack," he said, "are best if we
approach from almost ahead, a little on the bow. Then we are lessening
the distance between us at the sum of the speeds of the flotilla and
the battleships. We 'll hit up about twenty-five knots when we see
them. Of--"

A low incisive voice sounded forward, a blotch of a hand and arm
pointing. There was a movement on the bridge as a dark object came
close. It was the _Jefferson_. A dull figure leaned over her bridge
with a megaphone.

"We 've blown out some boiler tubes and scalded a couple of men,
_D'Estang_. Go in ahead."

"All right," Jack's voice was muffled.

Again came the voice of the lookout and the arm pointed ahead.

"Oh!" Anne pinched Sara's arm. "I see them. See those great black
shadows over there?" She stepped forward. "Shall I tell them?"

But Armitage had seen. He turned to the yeoman.

"Full speed, ahead!"

"Full speed, ahead, sir."

The slender hull throbbed with the giant pulsings of the two sets of
engines. There was not another sound. It was as though the vessel
were plunging through a