rail down and then the other, but
not making it hard to stand almost anywhere around deck, except that
when you went aft there was a drive of air that lifted you maybe a
little faster than you started out to go. Swinging along she went, a
long, easy swing, carrying a long white swash to either side of her,
vibrating a thousand to the minute on her fantail, streaming out a long
white and pale-blue wake for as far as we could see, and just clear of
her taffrail piling up the finest little hill of clear white boiling
water.

Twenty-nine, they say, she was making, and still picking up. What!
Thirty? And a little more left in her? What d'y' know--some little baby,
hah?

Another radio came to the bridge: "A shell below our water-line.
Settling, but still afloat and still fighting."

"Good work. Stick to it," they said on the bridge, and wondered whether
it was the skipper or the radio man who was framing the messages. He had
the dramatic instinct, whoever he was.

Perhaps twenty minutes later came: "Water in our engine-room."

And then: "Fire in our forehold, but will not surrender. Look for our
boats."

And: "They are now shooting at our antennae."

Radios to the bridge are not posted up for the crew to gossip over, but
there was no keeping that last one under cover.

"Shelling their attenay? Well, the mortifying dogs! Whatever you do,
don't let 'em get your attenay, old bucket."

Our thirty-knot clip was eating up the road. We were getting near the
spot. The canvas caps came off the guns, and the gun crews were told to
load and stand by. A chief gunner's mate was told to make ready his
torpedo-tubes. He was a famous torpedo-man. He would stay up all night
with an ailing gyro or hydrostatic piston and not even ask to sleep in
next morning for a reward, and he had a record of making nothing but
hits at torpedo-practice. But he had been glum all the trip. He had
stayed past the legal hour on liberty the last time in, and the shore
patrol had come along and scooped him up. A court-martial was coming to
him and so he had been glum; but not now. He went around decks smiling,
with a little steel thing that looked like a wrist-bag but wasn't. It
held the keys to the magazines.

Pretty soon he had torpedo-tubes swinging inboard and outboard, and
between every pair of tubes a man sitting up in an iron seat that looked
like the kind that goes with a McCormick reaper, which all helped the
gunner's mate to feel better. He