Chapter I: The Supply Ship

Captain Sir Owen Kettle, K.C.B., shook his head and sighed. "I have tried everything, sir, from the Flying Corps to Motor Transports and R.A.M.C., and not one of them will have me. They say I've a wooden leg."

"And that's not true," broke in Lady Kettle. "The Captain's is a high-class American limb that cost £26 18s., even with the discount. At least, the one he wore when he tried to enlist was. He still has his old wooden implement (which Mr. McTodd made him), but he only wears that about home here, and when we've no company. Mr. McTodd meant well, but he made the leg of Honduras mahogany, and that's too heavy. It's as good as an extra vest to the Captain when he wears it."

"I'd like to show you our roses, sir," said Kettle, by way of getting rid of a painful subject. "We had mildew on them, but I've syringed them with a patent mixture of my own, and they're as clean now as a well-scrubbed deck. I don't mind owning that the mixture is founded on Quale's Sheep Dip, but I think I shall be able to get Government protection for my adaptation of it. I have always been anxious, Mr. Carnforth, to start in the patent medicine trade, and this is my first opening. 'Try Kettline for mildew on your roses.' It would sound well on the advertisements, especially with a verse or two of poetry added. I've got quotations already for space in the _Gardener's Friend_."

The big politician looked at the little sailor with a thoughtful eye, and the unprejudiced observer might have jumped to the conclusion that he was going to swear. But Mr. Carnforth knew his Kettle from bitter experience, and passed a cigar case instead, and in his turn talked roses, their diseases, their colours, and their culture, till even Captain Kettle had no further views to offer on the topic. And, at the finish, said he, "Now, my man, if you're fed up on flummery, we'll get down to bed-rock business. Are you open to killing a few Germans?"

"I haven't got a game ticket, sir, but my ten-shilling licence covers the killing of vermin."

Martin Carnforth, M.P., grinned. "You're your little old self. In this case it's the crew of a certain German submarine, number unknown."

"I've a lot of theories, sir, about the way to catch submarines. Our Navy----"

"Never mind the Navy, and never mind your theories for the moment. This is a particular vessel which is to be off Ireland--North or South, I don't know which at present--in a month's time, and I'm not telling the Admiralty about her because they do nothing. I told the Admiralty before about a German submarine which would be at a certain spot within a certain limit of time, and they said my news was of interest, but policy forbade them to act upon it. That submarine got busy. She sank seven big steamers in a week, not to mention four trawlers. We even owned up to four of the steamers and a brace of trawlers."

Captain Kettle was openly shocked. "And you a Member of Parliament, sir!"

"I'm sick and ashamed of it. Parliament talks and does nothing for fear of losing its votes and its salaries, and I'm aching to do something. They won't let me into either of the Services, because they say I'm too old, and can't see, and am touched in the wind, and am liable to pains in the carburettor. So I'm going on my own. I'm going to be a dam' pirate, and if the Navy catches me trying to help Great Britain, I suppose I shall hang. Question is--will you chip in with me?"

"Certainly not," said Lady Kettle. "The Captain's a respectable gentleman, now."

"I'll come like a bird," said the little sailor--his red torpedo beard stuck out aggressively. "By James, Mr. Carnforth, sir, I've been aching to have a bat at those Dutchmen ever since the war started. I've only to get my next Sunday's sermon in our chapel arranged for--

"You can leave me to attend to that, Captain," said Lady Kettle, and there was a distinct gleam of triumph in her eye. "I've never been allowed in the pulpit yet, Mr. Carnforth, but women must do men's work in this war-time, and if there's a drop in the collection I'll know who it is that's short, and she can buy her next week's butter from Skipton, or where she likes. Not another pound does she have from this farm."

We may pass over, then, a voyage across the Atlantic in the next packet that sailed, and a train journey through the United States from Jersey City to New Orleans. In that capital of moist heat and doubtful drainage they put up at a modest and inconspicuous hotel, and I regret to say under assumed names.

"If my name got down here," said Carnforth, "I should find myself in the papers."

"If mine got out," said Kettle rather awkwardly, "I'm afraid I should find myself in gaol. You see, sir, I've been here before. He was only a thief of a stevedore when we had the bit of trouble, but he's a political boss now, and Irish, and they say he's a long memory. But an archdeacon, situated as I was then, couldn't have resisted giving it that man on the nose."

"Very well, I'll be Mr. Martin, and you--let me see--you had better be Colonel Owen. You don't look like a plain mister. And now about this steamer. My cable says she's the _Grüda_, nominally Norwegian owned, and under charter to a Chicago firm with a German name."

"She's a tanker, sir, about 1,800 tons, twin-screw, loaded, and alongside the levee this minute."

"Then," said Carnforth, who was a business man, "the next thing to do is to get passages on her through the pretence that we've got to leave here in a hurry. Afterwards, when we have found out her rendezvous with the German submarine, we'll take charge." He produced from his pocket an automatic pistol and a glass tube full of small tabloids. "If we can't drug the crew with the chemicals, we'll have to use the cordite."

"I rather object to dope, sir. It leaves an awful head afterwards, as I know, and doping's not quite a white man's trick."

"My good Captain, you mustn't be too nice-fingered. This war with Germany is not run under Queensberry rules--they've seen to that. We've got to win, and you can take it from me we shall have to be all-in to do it."

"Well, sir," said Kettle, with a sigh, "you're a Member of Parliament, and ought to know; and anyway you're, so to speak, my owner on this trip. You give the orders, and I'll see them through."

"Right," said the big man, "that's a bargain. And now, as you've told me many times you're bad at fiction, I'll go and beard the skipper on the _Grüda_, and bamboozle passages out of him for the pair of us. I expect it will only be a case of being able to pay enough."

To Captain Sir Owen Kettle, K.C.B., who was anxiously smoking his fifteenth cigar for the day, Carnforth returned three hours later, flatly discouraged.

"The captain of that tanker was hopeless. I appealed to his better feelings, and I appealed to his pocket, and one might as well have tried to work on the conscience of an alligator. I tried the agent: he said if I didn't get to hell quick on my own accord, he'd send me there. I rang up the runner who is to supply the crew, and he said he was full already. And the boat sails with to-morrow's daylight."

Kettle took his cigar from his mouth and examined the tip. "And who was the runner, sir?"

"Morrissey. Keeps a flash saloon about two blocks off Canal Street, on the French side."

"That's luck about Morrissey. Well, Mr. Carnforth, we might get shipped still, but the method won't be pleasant."

"I'll stomach anything to get success. What's the scheme?"

But Captain Kettle would divulge no details. Only after they had dined, and put in a couple of hours at a movies show where even a Polar whaling picture could hardly check the perspiration, he led with easy assurance through the crowded traffic of Canal Street to Mr. Morrissey's saloon.

"Seem to know your way," Carnforth commented.

"I've been in New Orleans before," Kettle admitted. "Evening, Mr. Morrissey."

"By the piper! You! I thought, Captain, you'd have died of lead-poisoning ten times over before this. And why are you gladdening N'Orleans? You haven't a ship here, or even down at the quarantine station."

"I want a ship. D'you know of one, Morrissey?"

"That takes a bit of thinking over, and I dare say you don't want to discuss your particular troubles before the beauty and fashion in the bar here. Come to my private room. Will you bring your friend?"

"Please. He wants to ship with me."

"We'll see what can be done. Just shut the door behind you, Mr.--er--Martin, I think you said your friend's name was, Captain? Bourbon or rye? I know you dislike our Scotch, Captain, because of its Chicago accent, though I always drink it myself. You see I've a good memory. Rye for you, eh, and Bourbon for your friend? Help yourselves. Make it a high-ball, if you like. Here's the squirt. Mine for the good old Scotch. You're looking at my nose, Captain, and I tell you it cost me a lot to have it put straight. But that's all past and over now, isn't it? Here's chin-chin!"

The saloon-keeper brimmed with affability, and, to Carnforth's surprise, Captain Kettle was affable also. He let the gross politician suggest rogueries and familiarities unspeakable. He allowed himself to be plied with whisky, and insisted that Carnforth should drink level. And he insisted on obtaining from his host promises of future employment which a child might have known that apoplectic person had not the smallest intention of making good.

From then onwards the evening seemed to fade out.

Carnforth, awaking with a splitting head and a brazen taste in his mouth, tried to reconstruct the details of the orgy without success. One thing he was sure about--he had not been drunk. He knew his capacity to a glass, and had not been within a bottle of it. And he was similarly confident about Captain Kettle. That mariner's iron head could have seen Mr. Morrissey under the table three times over. But who had taken him back to the hotel and put him to bed, and why was the hotel so full of grumbling, rumbling machinery?

At that point Carnforth waked a trifle more, stretched himself gingerly (as he found he was a mass of bruises and aches), and discovered he was not in the hotel at all. He was in a room that was warm and smelt of grease, and he was lying on the wooden floor of a box that reminded him of a coffin. Then he recognized it as a steamer's bunk.

"Glad to see you're coming round, sir," said a voice from the gloom. "Morrissey's done it pretty thoroughly, hasn't he? The swine's even stolen my best leg."

"That you, Kettle? D'you know where we are? Looks to me we're on a steamer."

"We're where we wanted to get. We're on the _Grüda_, sir, and by the way her wheel engines are clattering we must be navigating that twisty bit below the quarantine station before you get to the Port Edes pass, and the pilot's nervous of piling her up on a sand bar. Drat these mosquitoes. Do you recognize the good old Mississippi smell?"

"Then we've been--what d'you call it--shanghaied?"

"That's right, sir. I guess we asked for it, and Morrissey very kindly did the rest. A man with a good memory, sir, Morrissey, and I must own I did make a bad mess of his nose, that time I attended to him. Great James! but I have a head and a mouth on me! I told you, sir, dope was filthy stuff."

"Well, I've lost my stock of that and my gun as well. It strikes me that now we are here we can't do any good."

"Oh, that'll be all right when the time comes," said the little sailor. "No use looking for trouble on ahead, sir. And now I should advise getting a spell of sleep for as much as we're let, though I don't suppose that will be for long."

It turned out there were five other drugged men in the bunks beside them; the _Grüda's_ errand was not sufficiently popular to enable her to ship a crew by above-board means; and when the pilot was dropped by the Port Edes light, and the steamer lifted to the heave of a brisk Norther in the Gulf outside, the need for hands became apparent, and large-booted mates proceeded to rouse the sleepers after the time-honoured methods.

All grumbled, and all were driven. Martin Carnforth, Esq., M.P., found that his name was Olsen and his destiny the stokehold. He went there, escorted by a volley of kicks. Kettle, after being yanked violently out of his bunk on to the iron deck below, was discovered to be a cripple, and was virulently abused for this misfortune.

"I'll knock the stuffing out of Morrissey next time I see Noo Orleans," said the _Grüda's_ mate, "for charging me for a whole man and only shipping a half one. Get up, you unipod."

Captain Kettle was yanked back to the vertical, and lost the remains of his temper. His skilled fingers shot out and seized a handful of the Mate's shaggy hair, and with that leverage he banged the man's head against an iron stanchion till he howled for mercy.

"Will you promise to treat me decently whilst I'm on this ship if I don't kill you now?"

"Ja----si----yes. What coundymans was you? You're name's nod Schlich."

"Seems that's the name I was shipped under, and therefore it's good enough for you. Where's my jury leg?"

"If it was worth a nickel, Morrissey's got it. An' he's beyond reach. We don' carry no spare legs in our slop-chest, but I'll have Chips make you one right now, and when you've got that shipped, you'll turn to as pantryman. Unnerstan'? Say 'sir' when you answer me."

"Aye aye, sir," said Captain Kettle cheerfully, and the mate, keeping a wary eye on him, backed out of the forecastle.

The _Grüda_ crossed the Mexican Gulf amongst silvery flying fish and islands of amber-yellow weed, rounded Florida with its screw-pile lights, and swirled North with the Gulf Stream. She bellowed her way through the fogs on the Banks, and missed a Miquelon fishing schooner by the short hairs. And then she butted her stolid path across the Western Ocean, exuding smells of petroleum and fried onions.

Her pantryman did his work, and called little attention to himself. His immediate master, the cabin steward, himself an untidy creature, commented on his frequent drawings of clothes from the slop-chest.

"You'll have no wages to pouch at the far end if you put so much on your back," said the steward.

"I know," said Kettle. "But I like to feel clean and neat. Where is the far end? I haven't the muzziest notion of where I signed on to."

"Oh, 'Kjobnhavn or orders,'" said the steward. "Probably 'orders'!"

"I don't believe there's a soul on board knows where we're bound for," said Captain Kettle to Carnforth that night as they sat together on the poop companion.

"What, not even the skipper?"

"Not even the captain, sir. At least he's a liar if he does. According to Mr. Mate, we're heading about for the middle of Ireland--say Limerick. I heard Mr. Mate ask the Old Man at tea to-night if that was our port, and the Old Man said he knew no more than the ship's tom cat."

But next day a new development showed itself. A span of wires was hoisted between the two mast-heads, and presently the crackle and spit of wireless broke out from the chart-house. For another day nothing happened, and the _Grüda_ loafed along at a steady half-speed. Then orders sharp and insistent evidently arrived out of space, and the tanker swung off on to a new course.

"Now we shan't be long," said Carnforth when he came off watch, and the pair were for a minute alone together. "I'm hanged if I can see what we can do. Have you managed to pinch a gun?"

"It's rather astonishing, sir, but I don't think, there's such a thing on board. They're an amazing lot of haymakers. We must tackle them, when the time comes, without that."

"Then you have a scheme?"

"I've ten, sir, but I don't know yet which will come into use. We must 'wait and see,' as you politicians say when your heads are empty of ideas."

"Well, I'm going to do something. I'll set fire to the petrol as the submarine's taking it on board, sooner than she shall go off with it. I suppose we shall get killed, but I'm not going home with nothing done."

"We shall not get killed, Mr. Carnforth, sir, and we shall do in the beastly Dutchmen all right. I make a point, sir, of never getting killed. If you fix in your mind beforehand that you are going to do your job and come through safe, you'll do it. I've proved that a hundred times, so I know. The main thing that's troubling me is Kettline."

"Is what?"

"That mixture of mine that is such death to mildew on roses. Lady Kettle was, as you know, sir, a business lady before I knew her, and she's been a business lady most of her life since. But you know what the sex is when it comes to bucking about gardens. If any one says how clean our roses are, she'll think no more about giving away the recipe than you would about telling your fellow politicians the name of your favourite throat tabloid."

"Well," said Carnforth impatiently. "I don't see that it matters."

"It matters all the time, sir. If that recipe goes to the wrong ear there's my patent jumped before you can say 'slug.' It's taken me ten years hard gardening, sir, to bring that mixture to its present perfection, and now I'm likely to have had all my trouble and chemistry for nothing."

"Better ask the skipper for the loan of the wireless," said Carnforth sarcastically, "and ring up your wife and tell her to take care."

"By James, sir," said Kettle, "that's a sound idea. The minute we've sunk that submarine I'll do it. But, for the time being, the submarine comes first, before," he added regretfully, "before even roses. Curse these Dutchmen. They're always getting in the way of something, and always will, I suppose, till they're all wiped out. Well, sir, there are a lot of wipers knocking about the world just now, that's one comfort."

Carnforth was tired and stiff with his unaccustomed work. He got up rustily. "Well," he said, "wait and see is all right, I dare say, for our tin-pot politics, but it is rather a poor sort of prescription for the serious business of war. Can't you give me something better to go on?"

"Yes, sir, I can. This ship is fitted with iron belaying-pins, and they're many of them loose. Learn to an inch where the loose ones are, so that you can always lay your hand on the nearest, either by night or day, without a wink-time's waste. If you have to hit with one, hit to kill. This is red war we've ahead of us, Mr. Carnforth, and it's either us or them, and don't you forget it, because they won't. Great James, there's my bell. I must go."

Three times the _Grüda_ changed her course in answer to the invisible orders, which gave a hint that the boat they were hurrying towards was not waiting for them placidly. Once all heads were drawn to the rail by the sight of a wrecked trawler's dinghy, and a patch of floating fish-boxes, and another time they steamed through a stinking, hobbling shoal of drowned and bloated mules. Three drowning cattlemen sailed with the mules as a sightless guard.

Here were signs enough of the outskirts of war, but the _Grüda's_ company remained placid. They were neutrals; if a British warship visited them their papers were all in order; and, for the rest, it was their full right to sail the seas and gather kroner whilst they might.

Then the wireless spoke again, and the scent grew hotter. Word was given to the engine-room that from then till the business was over the fullest head of steam was to be kept ready for instant use, and the devil take fuel consumption. Two derrick-booms were slung overside and their goose-necks dropped into sockets riveted on to the ship's plating ready for them. The booms had lifts and braces so that the submarine could be moored between them, and lie there snugly alongside without danger of some sudden western ocean swell rolling the steamer down on the top of her. Oil hoses were ranged, pumps given a trial run, hoists rigged, and all made coolly ready.

The Norwegian captain had little to say in all this. The wireless man took over complete charge, and the ship's company were given to understand that here was the complete Prussian Naval Officer who could and would deal out death, if necessary, without an afterthought. He, at any rate, would have a revolver handy somewhere, and Captain Kettle--the ship's pantryman--puzzled as to where the man had it stowed. But the _Grüda's_ crew regarded the Prussian with bovine unconcern.

Suddenly out of the near horizon the submarine leapt into sight at nineteen knots. She swooped down, turning in a narrow circle, and made fast cleverly to the booms that were waiting for her. Captain Kettle mentally took off his cap to the smartness of her seamanship.

She was an uncouth devil of a vessel with low freeboard and ugly excrescences along her decks, especially amidships, and she bristled with dirty, scrubble-bearded men who knew exactly what to do, and did it at the double. Six of them came on to the tanker, all shod with especially heavy knee-boots, which they used mercilessly on the Norwegians--particularly on the boot-using mates and skipper--whenever the speed of work was not entirely up to their standard. One with Zeiss binoculars round his neck was bowsed up to the foremast truck, and swung there on a bo's'n's chair, and peered round, and declared the seas empty. The rest of them saw to passing the oil hose, and to whipping up Whitehead torpedoes out of the carrier's hold, and gingerly transhipping these across to their own craft.

A grimy stoker crept out of the alleyway into the pantry and hissed a whisper into the pantryman's ear. "Good God, man, you see what they are doing. Are we going to do nothing?"

The pantryman cocked his red-pointed beard truculently. "What can we do?" he snapped.

"Go and bash in an end of one of those Whiteheads, and send the whole outfit of us to hell together. I'll do the trick. It's worth it."

"The torpedoes won't have their heads filled. They'll do that after transhipment."

"Then what are you going to do?"

"To use your phrase, sir, you must 'wait and see.'"

"Oh, to the devil with your politics," said Carnforth, M.P., and flung off in a black rage.

Once from the look-out at the tanker's masthead came an alarm (in German, of which Captain Kettle could only grasp the general sense), and work went on at a still more furious pace, though the submarine was ready to slip and be away at a moment's notice. As certain people, on their friend, the neutral, seemed restive, they cast loose the two 3-inch guns they carried forward and aft, and trained them point blank on the _Grüda's_ bowels. They were unmannerly brutes, these Germans, but in the business of war they were eminently business-like. Their motto was, "Win somehow, anyhow. Explain away awkward details afterwards."

The Whiteheads got handed down without mishap, but an unpleasant incident came about through the passing across of a 3-inch shell. Either one of the maltreated Norwegians set the fuse for short time, or there was a jar that upset the nerves of the high explosive inside, or some other trifle outside the ordinary routine occurred; the present deponent is ignorant of the details; but, anyway, the result was an explosion, half-hearted perhaps, still, anyway vehement enough to kill outright two German sailors, and seriously damage a third.

A crisp order spat out from the conning-tower, and all three were booted over into the Atlantic, and work went on in its smooth routine. The officers of the submarine had no use for either the dead or the inefficient.

When they were filled up with fuel and ammunition, they demanded food and drink--especially drink. The Norwegian captain had no order for this, and objected. A second afterwards that Norwegian captain was focusing both his eyes down the black hole which exists in the middle of a revolver barrel. Expert collectors raided pantry and storerooms, and the _Grüda's_ pantryman helped them. The pantryman was thinking hard, but didn't see his way to resist just then. The pantryman was addressed in German, but not having a good command of that tongue, replied in fluent Arabic, which he thought at the moment was less dangerous than English. In the distance a rugged black-faced stoker danced and raged, but the pantryman declined to see him.

Finally, when their ship was full of fuel, and munitions, and provisions, the Germans decided they might stretch their limbs and their lungs. They were taking no chances, but as their man at the _Grüda's_ foremast head reported the sea all round as still clear, they hauled up the chief engineer's two-and-a-half octave harmonium on deck, and a professional pianist amongst them played waltz tunes. The rest danced. They danced heavily (being shod with knee boots), and danced ungracefully, but they danced with energy, as beseems men who were keeping in condition entirely for the good of their Empire. When they slackened at all in their dance, one or other of their officers beat them brutally with a knotted rope's end.

The German officers sat on the engine-room skylight, and drank Milwaukee beer, which was the only liquor other than water remaining in the _Grüda's_ store, and smoked their own cigars. They drank this thin lager to the waltz music at such a rate that the cabin steward had to call up his pantryman to help open the bottles; and they sat till they had finished the stock; their crew, be it well understood, being still employed in that heavy athletic dance.

When no further bottles were forthcoming the German captain gave the order for all of his hands to get aboard, and followed them himself, nimbly enough, the submarine lying on the port side of the supply ship, and curtsying decorously between the booms to which she was tethered fore and aft.

The Norwegian captain, insulted, flushed, and ashamed, mounted to his own bridge, and there was present with him also just the quartermaster at the wheel. On the decks of the submarine men were battening down the hatches which received the Whiteheads, the stores, and the petrol. Other hands were standing-by the head and stern-fasts. She was quite ready to be off again on her cheery game of murder.

The German captain, somewhat gravid with the beer, climbed by the outside beckets to the deck of the conning-tower, and then gave the word to "let go forrard."

At that moment Captain Kettle arrived on the _Grüda's_ upper bridge. There was no mistaking him for the ship's pantryman, and the Norwegian captain did not so mistake him. He limped (because of his carpenter-made wooden leg), he was dressed in steward's kit, but the Norwegian's words were:

"What do you here, captain?"

There was no time for argument--or for losing the benefit of the surprise. Captain Kettle threw the Norwegian skipper violently down the ladder, laid out the quartermaster with a scientific jab on the point of the jaw, and slammed down the telegraph of the starboard engine to "Full speed ahead."

The German captain of the submarine, to give him his due, saw the whole thing as soon as it was done--and two seconds of time covered it from first to last--and acted on the tick. He also ordered "Full speed ahead," and though his engines (being Diesels) were a shade slower in responding, the mass of his vessel was far less than that of the _Grüda_, and he got way on her far more swiftly. In the meantime he whipped out an automatic pistol, and bombarded Kettle with vicious energy.

That small mariner, however, had the height of the _Grüda's_ bridge in comparison with the low freeboard of the submarine in his favour, and with the wheel in his hands, as soon as his tanker gathered steerage way, had the game his own way. Steamer and submarine met nose to nose almost, as the gap between them grew smaller; and the _Grüda's_ forefoot scraped down the war vessel's side, unshipping her starboard diving rudders, and disarranging her fittings generally; and then Kettle rang on both engines, and the submarine's stern sank under the pressure, and the larger ship lifted, and drove over the top of her.

The submarine's conning-tower hatch was still open, and if she had been allowed due time she would have filled and sunk. But as frequently happens at sea, the unforeseen intervened.

The _Grüda's_ forefoot dinged in one of her adversary's plates, which in its turn depressed a stringer, which impinged on one of her stern torpedo-tubes. The inbending of the tube pressed home the striker of the Whitehead inside it, and Vesuvius burst forth in the Atlantic off the Irish Coast. The yell of the explosion was loud enough to split Heaven. The submarine was a mere magazine of high explosives, and the firing of the first Whitehead, in-board, touched off all the lot.

When things calmed down again there was no submarine, or trace of one, the _Grüda_ was badly by the head, and obviously settling down for good, and a black-faced stoker was on the upper bridge rather hysterically demanding of high Heaven how Captain Kettle dared do all these things without consulting him. Captain Kettle from somewhere had procured a cigar, which he carried, cocked high in the starboard angle of his mouth, and from which he was smoking complacently. He was feeling that pleasant satisfaction which comes to a man after a good morning's work.

The _Grüda_, as it turned out, descended to the sea-floor much more hurriedly than anyone expected. "The forward bulkhead will keep her up," said everybody, but either she was holed aft of that, or the forward bulkhead gave--which, I do not know, and am not going to dive to the Atlantic floor to discover. Anyway, she started to sink with alarming suddenness, and the port quarter life-boat's falls proved to be rotten, and emptied out her people just before she reached the water. The starboard life-boat was lowered successfully, but would take neither Kettle nor Carnforth, though why they objected to Carnforth I fail to see. However, the wireless man, who said he was a Prussian, and who carried a revolver (and who showed it to them then) declined to allow their coming on board, and that starboard boat rowed off in sulky silence.

"We'd better haul up the other boat and provision her," said Carnforth, who was always cool at sea, even if he was invariably ignorant of seafaring matters.

"I'm afraid there's no time, sir," said Captain Kettle politely. "If you will follow me down the falls we'll try and unhook and then swim away before this steamboat founders and sucks us down with her. Incidentally, when the cold water gets to the boilers they will collapse, and may blow her up any minute."

"Oh Lord, man, don't wait to talk," said Carnforth, and slid down one fall whilst Kettle gained the water by the other. And promptly they both swam at the full of their speed away from the danger spot, though when the man with two legs found he was distancing the man with one, he pretended tiredness and eased his pace.

But the tanker was not long in her agony. She blew out her decks quite decorously, reared to the vertical, and sank with hardly a bubble.

"And now," said Captain Kettle, "about-ship, sir, please, and we'll try and right that boat."

So back they swam, heavily and wearily (being more than middle-aged men), and reached the boat some five minutes after each had decided he could swim no longer, but would hang on just to encourage the other man. They clung to the boat's life-lines, panting, half delirious with fatigue and chill, but with pluck and stamina pulling them gradually round.

At last, just as Carnforth was beginning to put in a suggestion that they should try and right the boat, there came a fresh surprise.

"_W-s-s-h. Sp-l-o-s-sh!_"

"_W-s-s-h. C-r-r-ash!_"

"My Great James!" said Kettle, "that's shellfire," and worked himself round to the other side of the boat to see further. Then he came back again, and---- "Keep your head down, sir," said he.

"There's another Dutch submarine turned up."

"What's she firing at?"

"Those wretched Sowegians in the starboard life-boat. She's sunk the lot of them, and now she's motoring away."

"The brutes! Their own friends, too! The unspeakable brutes. My God, that's the way Germans make war!"

"Dead men tell no tales, sir. They thought those Sowegians knew too much. We can thank the Lord, sir, they saw this boat was wrong side up. We'll wait, if you please, till they're hull-down before we try to right her."

How that port life-boat was turned on to her keel again, baled, and navigated to the distant Irish Coast, I do not propose to record here, as there is another tale connected with it which would be too long in the telling. But a conversation between Captain Kettle and Mr. Carnforth whilst they were thawing themselves out with bad whisky and a peat fire after their landing hangs in my mind.

"Is there a telegraph office here, Pat?" asked the M.P.

"There is then, yer 'annar," said the landlord. "It's the best in Ireland when the lines is working."

"Good, then, I'll get off a wire."

"I'll be obliged, sir," said Captain Kettle, "if you'd let me send a message first. I want to get early word to my wife to keep quiet about that use of Quale's Sheep Dip for roses. It is highly important she shouldn't talk on the subject. I want you to understand this means a lot to me, sir."

Carnforth was shaken with a gust of laughter. "Oh, go on, man, by all means," he said at last. "I was only going to tell the Admiralty about our bag, and they'll probably want to hang us for piracy and for doing what they hadn't the sense to think of. But don't you worry about me. Your message is far more important."