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