r_ happened to cut his course so fine I
never learned, but the patchiness of the drifting mist must have had a
good deal to do with making him misjudge his distance. At any rate, just
as we had turned through nine or ten points, I suddenly saw the
ominously bulking bows of the _Olympus_ come juggernauting out of the
night, with the amorphous loom of the bridge and foretop towering
monstrously above. The _Flyer_ seemed fairly to jump out of the water
at the kick her propellers gave her as the turbines responded to the
bridge's call for "More steam," and a spinning puff of smoke darkened
the glow above the funnels for a moment as fresh oil was sprayed upon
the fires beneath the boilers.

It was a good deal like a cat scurrying in front of a speeding
motor-car, and the consequences would have been more or less similar had
not one of the _Olympus's_ swarming lookouts, peering into the darkness
from his screened nest, gathered hint of the disaster that menaced in
time to warn the forebridge. The great super-dreadnought responded to
her helm very smartly considering her tonnage, and she turned just far
enough to starboard to avoid grinding us under. I could almost look up
through the port hawse-pipe as the flare of her bow loomed above my
head, and the man standing by the depth-charges on the all-but-grazed
stern of the _Flyer_ might well have been pardoned even if the story his
mates afterwards told of his action on this occasion were true--that he
had tried to fend off one of the largest battleships afloat with a
boat-hook.

A silhouette against the barely perceptible glow at the back of the
forebridge of a "brass-hatted" officer shaking his fist as though in the
act of ramping and roaring like a true British sailor moved by righteous
anger; a forty or fifty degree heel to starboard as the curling bow-wave
of the _Olympus_ thwacked resoundingly along her port side, and the
_Flyer_ drove on into the sleet-shot darkness to blow off accumulated
steam in rolling clouds, allow her fluttering pulse to become normal,
and resume the even tenor of her way.

Melton, A.B., whistling over and over the opening bars of the chorus of
"Do You Want Us to Lose the War?" started his metallically clanking jig
again, but presently, like a man with something on his mind, sidled over
and shoved his Balaklava-bordered face against the outside of the
closely-reefed hood of my "lammy" coat, and muttered thickly something
about being afraid he had