headway decreased, and she came to a
stop, two hundred yards on the port bow of the onrushing _Riga_, whose
crew yelled derisively--whose quick-fire guns still punished her.

But the yells suddenly ceased and the gunners changed their aim. A
small thing had left the nearly submerged tube in the cruiser's stem,
and the gunners were now firing at a darting line of bubbles,
obliterating the target for a moment with the churning of the water,
only to see the frothy streak within their range, coming on at
locomotive speed. They aimed ahead; two five-inch guns added their
clamor, and even a Hontoria turret-gun voiced its roar and sent its
messenger. But the bubbles would not stop; they entered the bow wave of
the battle-ship, and a second later the great floating fort separated
into two parts, with a crackling thunder of sound and an outburst of
flame and smoke which came of nothing less than an exploded magazine.
The two halves rolled far to starboard, then to port, shivered,
settled, turned completely over, and sank in a turmoil of bursting
steam and air-bubbles. Three minutes later the _Beaufort_ lifted her
stern and dived gently after her victim, still groaning hoarsely from
her punctured iron lungs. In her death-agony she had given birth to a
child more terrible than a battle-ship.

The rear ship of the inner column, the _Atholl_, was officially an
armored cruiser, but possessed none of the attributes of the cruiser
class. She was the laggard of the fleet, and her heaviest guns were of
six-inch caliber; but, being designed for a battle-ship, she carried
this temporary battery behind sixteen inches of steel, and had
maintained her integrity, taking harder blows than she could give. With
the going down of the _Beaufort_ she took a position astern of the
_Sutherland_, and the double line of battle was reduced to a single
line; for the _Argyll_ had left the column when the flag-ship sank.

And this is why the overmatched, battered, and all but demoralized
cruisers received no more attention from the enemy; it were wiser to
deal with the _Argyll_. The _Saratov_, blazing fiercely from the
effects of a well-planted shell, had drawn out of line, the better to
deal with her trouble. Her place in the line and that of the sunken
_Riga_ were filled by the following ships drawing ahead; but the fleet
still held to double column, and into the lane between the lines the
_Argyll_ was coming at sixteen knots, breathing flame, vomiting