my stomach, as if someone had given me a cut with a whip.
As I put my hand down to it the whole front of my overall dropped away
where a fragment of shell casing had shot across it. A few threads--I
found out later--had been started on my singlet, but my hide was not
even scratched. I heard the 'T.I.' give a yell, and when I looked round
saw his face covered with blood, and a flap of skin from his forehead
hanging down over one eye like a skye terrier's ear. The piece of proj
had caught him a nasty side-swipe, though without hurting anything but
his looks in the least. And it wasn't that he was yelling about, either,
but at me for not giving him the course and speed of the second cruiser.
He had the flap of skin tied up out of his eye--using a strip of my
overall because neither of us could find a handkerchief--by the time I
was back at the handle. I saw the blood dribbling over his sights, but
he seemed to be seeing through them all right, for he was telling me how
to train when I felt the helm begin to grind as it was thrown hard over
to make a sudden alteration of course. She heeled fifteen or twenty
degrees as she turned six points to starboard, and the boil of her wake
flooded across her stern three or four feet deep. The sudden heel threw
me off my feet, and I pulled up just in time to see us rushing by, and
just missing by a few yards, a stopped destroyer that was nothing but
spurts of fire flashing under a rolling cloud of steam and smoke.

"She seemed to be afire all over, and about ready to blow up; yet, from
the quick flashes of some of the spurts of fire, I knew they came from a
hard-pumped gun that some stout-hearted lads were working to the last.
There was nothing in the look of that spouting volcano of smoke and
steam that would help a man to tell whether it was a battleship or a
trawler, but I knew that it could be only the _Nectar_, our Division
leader. We never saw her nor anyone in her again. She must have gone
down within a few minutes, and anyone that survived fell into the hands
of the enemy. She led us a fine dance while it lasted, and the only pity
was that she couldn't trip it to the end.

"That left the old _Nairobi_ as the last of the Division, and I haven't
any recollection of any of the rest of the flotilla being in sight by
then. Not that I had any time to look for them, though. Our sudden
change of course to keep from ramming the _Nectar_ spoiled our chance at
the second Hun cruiser, but w