ffect. I saw one of our shells bursting
on the Huns, and why their shooting at us was so bad I have never quite
understood. The fact we were settled so deep aft from our speed was
plainly making a lot of shells ricochet over what would otherwise have
been hits, but, at the same time, the bows being so much higher out of
the water offered all the more target for'ard. It was more 'Joss' than
anything else, I suppose. Besides, the _Nectar_ was just on the edge of
getting hers anyhow.

"I saw all these things out of the corner of my eye like, for my mind
was centred on getting what the 'T.I.' wanted to know about his cruiser.
I knew just what this was to a 't,' for I'd taken many a turn of drill
at the tubes. 'Parallel courses, thousand yards range, speed about
twenty-five,' I shouted, jumping down again; 'and you'll have to slip
her right smart or you'll miss your chance.' Right then the seas
flattened down for a few seconds, and the 'T.I.', giving me an order of
how to train her, set his sights and pulled the cocking lever. A moment
later he fired, and the mouldie slipped out smooth and easy and started
running straight and true for a point the Hun was going to arrive at
about a minute later."

Prince had been poking away at a sprayer as he talked, with the
fluttering light-mote from the fire in the heart of the furnace playing
on one of his squinting eyes in a way that, with the other quenched in
shadow, gave his face a look of Cyclopean fierceness. "I jumped up on
the tubes again to follow our little tin fish on its swim," he resumed.
"There seemed to be a bit of a flap on the cruiser, for its next salvo
fell a long way short of us. One of the shells--a five-or
six-incher--did not explode, but bounced off the water and came
'skip-jacking' along straight for us. It kicked into the water twice
before it reached us, the second time right at the base of the wave that
was rolling up and hiding our sunken stern, and that seemed to give it
just enough of an up-flip to make it clear the _Nairobi's_ shivering
hull. It came so slow that I caught the glint of the copper band round
its base, and so low that the after superstructure blotted it off from
my sight as it passed over the stern. One of the after gun's crew told
me he could have reached up and patted it as it tumbled along over his
head. He said it was going so slow that he hardly felt any wind at all
from it. Perhaps that was because he had his own wind up, though, for i