stopped ten seconds to tell the story
of the new gun-crew man who was sent up the yard to the storekeeper for
a pair of spurs to ride the torpedo-tubes with.

There were four guns, one forward, one aft, and two in the waist. They
had been slushed down with vaseline to keep the salt-water rust off; now
they were swabbing the grease off. Grease on the outside of a gun does
not affect the shooting of the inside, but a gun ought naturally to look
slick going into action.

[Illustration: Our thirty-knot clip was eating up the road. We were
getting near the spot.]

Trainers and pointers stood beside their loaded guns, and other members
of the gun crew held up shells, the noses of the shells stuck into the
deck mat and the butts resting against the young chests of the gun crews
as they stood in line. There was a nineteen-year-old lad who, when I
knew him two years before, was doing boy's work in the Collier
bookbindery. Now he was a gun-captain standing handy to his little pet
and trying not to look too proud when he peeked up toward where I was.

The foretop reported smoke on the horizon ahead. That would be on the
_Luckenbach_. And where she was the U-boat was. The forward gun was
trained a point to right of the smoke.

One senior watch-officer, now in the foretop, called down that he could
now see the ship. Smoke was coming out of her hull. Soon he reported
shells splashing alongside of her. Those would be from the U-boat. Soon
we all could see the ship from the bridge.

The foretop then reported the U-boat. She was almost dead ahead. She
could not be seen from the bridge, but, directed by the foretop, the gun
was trained on the horizon dead ahead; 11,000 yards was the range. The
gun was one of the latest type--only a 4-inch--but a great little gun
just the same.

"Train and fire," said the skipper. Bo-o-m! it went, flame and smoke. We
could not see the splash from the bridge, nor could they in the foretop.
It probably dropped beyond the submarine, which soon we could see--a
pretty big fellow she looked with two guns. She had been shelling the ship
even while we were running up, and as our first shot boomed out she let go
another shell. We expected her to send a couple our way--she probably
carried bigger guns than we did--but she did not; she let go another at
the steamer. "Maybe at the antennae," said a chief quartermaster on the
bridge.

We shortened our range. The gun was trained and ready for firing when a
s