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urb them in the least; then the wheel was spun back 'midships--and a spoke or two beyond to meet and steady her--the bow wave resumed its curled symmetry and the wake began trailing off astern again. It was into a peaceful sea, indolently rolling, sunset tinged and slightly sleeked with a thin streak of oil, that we had raced five minutes before; it was a troubled sea, charge-churned and wave-slashed, that we now nosed back into to see what good our coming had wrought. The grey-blue-black of the long oil wake had been scattered into broken patches by the explosions. Most of these were pale, sickly, and highly anaemic in colour, and of scant promise; but for one, where fresh oil rising spread rainbow-bright upon the surface, the _Zip_ headed full tilt. The explosion here appeared to have been an unusually heavy one, for the sea was dotted with the white bellies of stunned fish, most of them floating high out of the water, with trickles of blood running from their upturned mouths and distended gills. A six or eight-foot shark, wriggling drunkenly along the surface with a broken back, was hailed with a howl of delight by the men, who claimed to see in the fact that the unlucky monster could not submerge his telltale dorsal, a sign that their Fritz might be in the same difficulty. Another "can" or two was let go as we dashed through that iridescent "fount of promise"; and when we turned back to it again the wounded shark had ceased to wriggle and now floated inertly among his hapless brothers. But of Fritz--save for a glad new gush of oil--no sign. Prisoners or wreckage are rated as the only indubitable evidence of the destruction of a U-boat, and neither of these were we able to woo to the surface in that busy hour which elapsed before the descending pall of darkness put a period to our well-meant efforts. During that time not the most delicate instrument devised by science for that purpose revealed any indication of life or movement in the depths below. As the water at this point was far too deep to allow a submarine to descend and lie on the bottom without being crushed, this fact appeared morally conclusive. It was this I had in mind when I tried to draw the captain out on the subject. "Of course there's no doubt we bagged him?" I hazarded, in a quiet interval when we were watchfully waiting for something to turn up, or rather come up. He smiled a rather tired smile. "Oh, very likely we have," he replied. "But, unluc
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