ad been put astern, the captain turned and drew a lever to
him with a sharp pull.

Three, four seconds passed, and then, simultaneously with a heavy
knocking thud, a round patch of water a hundred yards or so astern
quivered and fizzed up sharply like the surface of a glass of
whisky-and-soda after the siphon has ceased to play on it. Following
that by a second or two, a smooth rounded geyser of foam boiled up a
dozen feet or so, and then gradually subsided. That one, plainly, was a
deep-set charge, whose force was expended far beneath the surface. A
second one threw a geyser twice as high as the first, and a third, which
fizzed and spouted almost simultaneously, blotted out a great patch of
sternward sky with its smoke-shot eruption.

Presently the _Zop_ "struck oil," and then the _Zap_. Soon the muffled
booms of their rapidly scuttled depth-charges began to drum, while
astern of them the foam-spouts nicked the sky-line like a stubby picket
fence.

Perhaps the lad whom I later overheard describing that bombardment by
saying that "'tween the three of us, we was scattering 'cans' like rice
at a wedding" was guilty of some exaggeration; but it is a fact that
they were spilling over very fast and, there is little doubt, with
telling effect. The savageness of the bolts of wrath released by the
exploding charges was strikingly disclosed when two of them chanced to
be dropped at nearly the same time by destroyers a mile or more apart,
when the under-sea "jolts" would meet half-way and form weird evanescent
"rips" of dancing froth strongly suggestive of chain-lightning. The way
in which even the most distant of the detonations made a destroyer "bump
the bumps," quite as though it was striking a series of solid
obstructions, gave some hints of the bolts that were descending upon the
lurking pirate.

At the end of a minute or two a quick order from the captain sent the
wheel spinning over, and, with raucous grinding of helm, round we swung
through sixteen points to head back in reverse over the path of
destruction we had just traversed. Just as the steel runners of a
racing skater throw ice when he makes a sudden turn, so the screws of a
speeding destroyer hurl water. The stern sank deep into the
propeller-scooped void, so that the high-tossed side-slipping wake
buried it beneath a frothing flood. Through several long seconds I saw
the water boiling above the waists of the men at the depth-charges,
without appearing to dist