got himself into trouble. When I had pulled
loose a snap and improved communications by unmuffling a lee ear, I
learned that it had just occurred to the good chap that he failed to
report to the bridge the battleship he had sighted "fifty yards to the
port beam," and he was wondering whether there would be a "strafe"
coming from the skipper about it.

"Fact is, sir," he said, speaking brokenly as the galloping gusts every
now and then forced a word back into his mouth, "that that rip-rarin'
stem, with the white foam flyin' off both sides of it, bearing down
right for where I was standin'--all that was so like what I saw the
night of Jutland in the _Firebrand_ that--that the turn it give me took
my mind right back and--and I wasn't thinkin' o' anything else till the
_'Lympus_ was gone by."

I assured him that, since the _Olympus_ had doubtless been sighted from
the bridge several winks before she had been visible from his
less-favourable vantage, they would probably have been too busy to
respond to his call at the voice-pipe even had he tried to report what
he saw.

"If I were you," I said, "I would forget all about that, and try to
explain how a cruiser that the _Firebrand_ was about to ram bow-to-bow"
(I had, of course, already heard something of that dare-devilish
exploit) "could have looked to you like the _Olympus_ ramping down on a
right-angling course and threatening to slice off the _Flyer's_ stern
with all her depth-charges. I quite understood that one ramming is a
good deal like another, as far as a big ship hitting a destroyer fair
and square is concerned, but----"

"'Twasn't that _first_ cru'ser 'tall, sir," Melton interrupted, nuzzling
into my "lammy" hood again to make himself heard. "Twas 'nother 'un,
sir--a wallopin' big un. The seas was stiff wi' cru'sers fer a minit,
sir, an' no sooner was we clear o' the first un than the second come
tearin' down on us, tryin' to cut us in two amidships. An' that last un
was a battl' cru'ser nigh as big as the _'Lympus_, all shot up in the
funnels and runnin' wild an' bloody-minded like a mad bull. We were
pretty nigh to bein' stopped dead, an' if she hadn't been slower'n cold
grease wi' her helm she'd ha' eat us right up."

There had been nothing of malice aforethought in my action in cornering
Melton on the searchlight platform that night, for, as it chanced, I
had failed to learn up to that moment that he had been in the famous
_Firebrand_ at Jutland. Nor, wi