achine-gun fire. With every man below tied down with his duties in
connection with submerging her, it is quite conceivable that nothing
could be done, once she was below the surface, to stop the inrush of
water, and that she was quickly beyond all hope of bringing up again. I
didn't have a fair chance to size up the hole ripped open by the bomb,
but rather think that also was large enough to have admitted a good deal
of water.

"It was rather disappointing in a way, having her go down like that, for
as things had turned out, it was a hundred to one we should otherwise
have captured her almost unharmed. There was a good deal of solace,
however, in the fact that none of the Huns were getting back to tell
what happened to them, so that this identical stunt was left open for
use again. As a matter of fact, variations of it were used a number of
times, by one kind of craft or another, before an unlucky slip-up--the
one which finished poor R----, by the way--gave the game away and
started us veering off on other tacks. I have had a number of successes
since that time," concluded K----, pouring me a glass of the yacht's
1835 Cognac as a night cap, "but never a one which was quite so much
like taking candy from a child as that 'opener.'"

CHAPTER X

THE _WHACK_ AND THE _SMACK_

There was always a strange and distinctive fascination to me in standing
on the bridge of one ship and watching other ships--and especially lines
of ships--push up and sharpen to shape above the edge of the sea.

This feeling, strong enough in ordinary times--when it was but a
peaceful merchantman one watched from and but peaceful merchantmen that
one saw--is intensified manifold when it is a warship's bridge one
paces, and only the silhouettes of ships of war that notch the far
horizon. Battleship, battle cruiser, light cruiser, destroyer, sloop,
trawler, and all the other kinds and classes of patrol craft--each has
its own distinctive smudge of smoke, its own peculiar way of revealing
its identity by a blurred foretop, funnel, or superstructure long before
its hull has lifted its amorphous mass above the sky-line.

And now to the sky-line riddles one was given to read, and to be
thrilled by as the puzzle revealed itself, had been added the great
troop convoy from America, my first sight of one of which was just
unfolding. H.M.S. _Buzz_, in which I chanced to be out at the time, was
not one of the escorting destroyers, and it was only by a