the stalking craft
trying to approach from a direction which silhouettes its leanly
purposeful profile against the golden glimmer of the sunset clouds. This
particular capsule of Kultur, rising with typical Hunnish effrontery for
his evening constitutional in an especially well-watched area while it
was yet broad daylight, still had the advantage of visibility
sufficiently on his side to make the thing a good deal less risky than
it looked. The skipper, doubtless coolly puffing his pipe as he lounged
over the rail of the bridge and filled his lungs with fresh air, must
have seen the masts and funnels of the speeding _Flash_ for a good half
hour before the latter's look-out sang out that he had picked up the
conning-tower of what looked to be a U-boat two points off the starboard
bow; so that all that was needed was the change of course which followed
that report to give Fritz fair warning that it was time to hide his
head for a while. Indeed, he must have been going down even as he was
sighted, for it was the matter of but a very few seconds more before the
_Flash_ found herself tearing at upwards of a thousand yards a minute
into an empty sea.

Under the circumstances, it is probable we gave that Fritz a fairly good
run for his money in showering the spot where he had disappeared with
what depth-charges we could spare, and then, like a fox-terrier after a
rat, standing by and "watching the hole." Unluckily, we had used a good
part of our stock of "cans" the day before, when a rather more promising
opportunity for attack had offered itself, while as for "watching the
hole," this particular patch of the North Sea chanced to be one in which
that way of playing the game was fraught with special difficulties
because it was sufficiently shallow for a submarine to lie doggo on the
bottom without danger of having its shell crushed in by the pressure of
the water. This defeated the uncannily sure way of tracking the U-boat
down by "listening," and demanded another form of special treatment,
which we were not, however, at the moment prepared to administer.

Slim as the chance was, the captain was reluctant to leave while any
hope remained, and it was only a signal ordering the _Flash_ to join in
some other work that had turned up (a destroyer is subject to as many
kinds of summons as a country doctor) that took him off in the end.
Mooring a buoy to mark the spot for "future reference," the captain saw
her headed off on the cour