Chapter II: The Mine-Layer

The _Grimsby Twins'_ otter trawl was down, scratching up fish from the Dogger below, and John Henry Shepherd, the elder of the twins, was smoking in the wheelhouse, and keeping the little steamboat approximately on her course. Arthur Cleethorpes Shepherd, his brother, and the only other hand on deck, was seated with his back against the main hatch, reading war news from a stale copy of the _Grimsby Gazette_.

To them came the strains of ecclesiastical music from the cabin skylight, proving that Captain Shepherd was awake, and was working his way through Messrs. Moody and Sankey's "Collection of Hymns." The steam trawler _Grimsby Twins'_ harmonium had a compass of two octaves only, but Captain Shepherd was a resourceful man, and when his music encroached beyond these narrow limits, he whistled the missing notes with his own lips, very efficiently. Mixed with the music that came from the skylight there drifted a fine aroma of onions, hinting that tea (with fried cod sounds) was under way, and that presently the watch would be changed.

"'Ote fresh i' t' paper, Clee?" called out John Henry.

"Aye, they're asking for more hands for them trawlers they've set on at mine-sweeping. I wish to God the old man would let us go."

"Well, he won't," said the elder twin in a husky whisper. "Said only just now when I took the wheel from him that all war was a crime and a mistake, and recommended me when she was steering easy to put up a bit of prayer to be delivered from the sin of wanting to chip in. I've a durn good mind---- Hey, Clee, what's that packet coming out of the mist ahead there?" He grabbed the binoculars from their box, and clapped them to his eyes. "It's a Grimsby man GY. 4696! Why there's no such number."

"Looks to me more like a Dutch boat."

"Looks to me like that Lowestoft craft, the _Bishop Something_."

"_Bishop Argles_. That's her. You can tell by that fancy vane Old Man Argles shipped on his fore-truck. But she's strangely mucked up. Those Lowestoft fellows have the queerest ideas of fishing. What for have they got that big derrick rigged aft?"

* * * * *

It was at this moment the steam trawler _Grimsby Twins_ struck the mine. She had missed it with her bows by a good fathom, but the drag of the heavy trawl warp over the quarter made her gait somewhat crab-wise, and with the help of a lifting swell she dropped down on the infernal machine almost amidships, so that one of its strikers was rammed thoroughly home by a downward blow from her starboard bilge keel.

Captain Shepherd's first intimation of disaster was being plucked from the harmonium stool by some unseen force, and flung violently against the cabin roof. The yell of the explosion, and the crash of smashing steel and iron came to him next, and by the time he had fallen back to the cabin floor, the stink of the yellow melinite fumes was making him cough and choke. The companionway was gushing wreckage and seawater, and he reached the deck by a scramble through the skylight.

His vessel was in two halves. Already the forward half was cruising away drunkenly by itself, with four dazed fishermen hanging on to the windlass; the poop end was sinking visibly; and in the churning water between the two, there swirled about the dead and shattered bodies of his two twin sons, one of them headless.

Ice was hot compared with the trawler's skipper's coolness then. In an instant of time all that he loved in the world, and all that he owned in the world was plucked from him. He did not whimper; he did not, after the manner of his kind, bombard heaven and all beneath it with furious curses; instead he gazed with stolid eyes at the other trawler looming through the mist ahead, and nodded slowly.

"It's what they said," he muttered, "and what I wouldn't believe--mines sown broadcast over the North Sea by those dog-begotten Dutchmen. O God, forgive me for not believing before what the British Government said, and give me life to pay back a bit of what I owe. Amen."

After which prayer he jumped overboard and swam to the _Grimsby Twins'_ boat, which had been blown clear and floated undamaged. Then he clambered into her, and set about rescuing those of his men who still floated about on wreckage.

* * * * *

The council of war which decided the fate of some 3,000 men, and (it is said) no less than five German ships of war, took place in the trawler's jolly boat some twenty minutes later. There were seven men on board of her, including Captain Shepherd, as survivors of the fishing steamer's complement, and two of them were wounded, one badly. Amongst them, also wet and miserable, and with his fur stained yellow by the explosive, was Joe, the trawler's cat.

"I suppose most of you think that good old Grimsby's the place we want to see next?" began Captain Shepherd.

"You pet," said Olssen, the Third Hand.

"I'm no' sure," said McCrae, Chief Engineer, looking hard at his superior officer.

"You're thinking of Jimmy, Mac?" suggested Captain Shepherd.

"I am, Cap. He was ma' sister's son."

"And he's now down--or parts of him are--amongst the cod on the Bank below. Olssen, your brother's not here, either?"

"_Nein._"

"Nor your boy, Dick?"

"He was smashed to a pulp, with young Olssen by the winch falling on them," said old Dick. He clutched at a sob in his throat. "A splendid lad he was, too, the young beggar. And there were your two pups and all, skipper. I saw them go out, too, in the middle of that stinking yellow smoke. We've always been a bit of what you might call a family ship. Very comfortable, too, and no trouble ever that meant anything. I'm sorry them cod sounds I was frying for you was wasted, chaps."

Captain Shepherd nodded to the compliment, and then hit the gunwale a hard blow with his fist to call the meeting to business. "Look here, men. We've all suffered, and we've got to get busy if we're going to show ourselves better than Joe and do anything besides meauling. I'll own up I've been a man with a wrong idea. I've been led away by a discourse once given in our chapel which said that at bottom the Dutchmen were fellers just like ourselves, and only wanted a bit of argument and some prayers to make them reasonable. That's wrong. What they want is hell, and I'm the man to give it them. Do you come in on the usual share terms as arranged for this fishing fleet?"

"If we were fitted as a man-o'-war," said McCrae cautiously, "I'd be wi' ye on the nod." He indicated with the wave of a hand the heavily built boat that carried them lumberingly over the fog-covered swells. "This is all I can see beyond the end of ma' neb at present. But perhaps you've a scheme, Cap?"

"Aye," said Captain Shepherd heavily, "I have what you might call a strategy in my head. Man and boy I've fished the Dogger (with short holidays in the Iceland seas) these forty years, and I know it, sea-bank and sea-top, better than most. I know the ways of the cod, I know the thoughts of the men that fish them, and I know the tracks of the shipping, come fog, come fine, as a North Sea fisherman should. I got but one short look at yon spawn of Beelzebub that was laying those mines from Tommy Argles' boat--I bet some language came out when they cut Tommy's throat, by the way--and she was steering North an' by East to half a tick-tack. Now do you see the scheme?"

They didn't.

Captain Shepherd went on patiently to explain. "They'll lay one line of mines across the ship track from South to North, and then when they've covered it they'll turn and lay another parallel to it, so that a ship that misses one line will be gathered by the next."

McCrae held up a brown hand and spat into it. "That's sound metapheesics. Cap, it's a pleasure to listen to ye. Go on."

"We'll pull out West from here; we'll with God's help miss the mines in the first line--and fellers you can take it from me, He will help us--and we'll wait for Mister Blessed Murder-Spreader as he comes down on his next trip. Then we'll get aboard and attend to his people, and when we've done that, I'll tell you what we'll do next. Any objections?"

They looked at one another thoughtfully, and conned the matter over. Your East Coast fisherman is always a mightily independent person, and sees to it that his private opinion has full weight. But there was no amendment, and the heavy boat was got under way.

Captain Shepherd, wooden-faced and silent, tucked his arm over an oar in the stern notch and steered. As utensils of navigation, he had a watch-chain compass, a big silver watch, and his nose, and he held a course through the fog as unfalteringly as a keeper might tread across familiar heather. Thrice they saw steam trawlers from Hull and Grimsby and Scarboro'; once they were hailed; but they made no attempt to break their voyage, or even to give hint of its purpose. They were all of them silent except Joe, the cat. Joe having less control than his betters, spat and swore aloud as he licked the yellow melinite stain from his salty fur.

"We don't want the Navy butting in," Captain Shepherd had said as an afterthought; "we'll make this a fisherman's job; and if afterwards they say we're a pack of pirates, well, I hope they'll have to own we're efficient pirates. The dead were our dead, and we're going to arrange the funeral ceremony without help or interference. Spell-o at those oars. Two of you other fellers take a turn now."

The mine-laying trawler crossed their track on its return trip exactly as Captain Shepherd had calculated, and though her look-out saw them and commented, the officer in charge made no attempt to slow down or pick them up. But some such courtesy as this had been anticipated; the boat lay in the steamer's track, stern to bow, and at full pressure on her oars; and under Captain Shepherd's handling she presently rasped down the trawler's side. Men who spend their lives boarding fish on to the carriers in all varieties of North Sea weather are impossible to beat at that sort of game.

What followed was by no means massacre. The seven men tumbled over on to the mine-cluttered decks without resistance, certainly, the cat following them; they had two iron belaying pins amongst them, and quickly picked up other weapons; but if it had not been for the surprise of their boarding they would have been driven over into the sea whence they came in quick time. But the surprise gave them the first start, and their toughness and the wild ferocity of their attack did the rest.

Captain Shepherd found an axe, and wielded it bloodily. They cleared the main deck under a spray of revolver bullets from an officer in the pilot house. Captain Shepherd went for him, ignoring the revolver, and got the axe well home on his right shoulder blade. He clove him through to the middle. There was no asking for or giving quarter on the English side, and when two or three of the Germans threw up their hands in surrender they were merely clubbed and slung overside as though they had been dog-fish.

The invaders cleared the decks of Germans, and then went below to forecastle, engine-room and cabin, and killed there, leaving only two alive. These two were English and in the stokehold, and heard hard things from their saviours about Englishmen who even under duress work for Germans and do not kill them. "So back to your kennel, you whipped pups," said Captain Shepherd at the end of his discourse on their personal appearance and behaviour, "and keep a full head of steam. We're away to the S'uth'ard and East'ard on pressing business.... Are you other fellers all sound? Where's Albert Henry?"

"Albert Henry got a bayonet in his stomach, and clapped his arms round the Dutchman that put it there and jumped with him into the ditch."

"And I think Hull Harry died just as we boarded. He must have been worse hurt than we guessed at when the _Twins_ blew up."

"That leaves five," said Captain Shepherd. "You, Olssen, take the wheel. Your course is Sou' East 'n by East. Mac, get below and learn up the coffee mill, and rub the fear o' God into those putty-livers that are firing her. And the rest of you swill down decks. I'm going to worry out how these mines are launched, and I want a clear head for it, so don't any of you fellers disturb me.... Oh yes, and there's one other thing. One of you hunt up a Dutch ensign: they're bound to have one aboard: and get it bent on to the signal halyards and ready to break out if any of their cruisers overhaul us."

The fishermen obeyed these orders none too promptly. They were all of them more or less cut and scratched, and to start with they gave one another rough first aid. Then (at Dick's suggestion) they raided galley and larder and pocketed a meal; and then (with food to refer to between whiles) they started to work, and each, according to the North Sea habit, set himself to do two men's toil.

In the meantime Captain Shepherd, who had never in his life seen a floating sea-mine, either on a ship's deck or elsewhere, set to work to puzzle out from the mass of boiler-iron and steel cable before him how he could sink, burn, and destroy his hated enemies without blowing up the steam trawler _Bishop Argles_ in the process. After he had done a given amount of execution he did not in the least mind what became of her or for that matter of himself or his crew. He was a man now entirely reckless, and if he gave a thought for his mates, concluded they were the same. He had received irreparable injury: the bigger injury he could do to any German in return, the happier he would die: that was all.

The ravelling out of the plan for a fleet of floating sea-mines is no job for an amateur. But Captain Shepherd was not the ordinary layman in this matter. He was a North Sea fisherman, which is as much as to say that he was mechanic, sailorman, carpenter and rule-of-thumb scientist combined, and he picked up intelligently the details of mooring tackle, riding cables, depth adjustment, striker adjustment, and all the rest of the intricate detail. He reasoned it out piecemeal from A to Z, and back again tediously from Z to A, slurring over nothing, concentrating thoughtfully on every doubtful point till it became entirely clear. Now and again Joe bumped a sympathetic nose against his leg, and he always pulled the cat's tail gratefully in recognition of the attention.

The North Sea too was kind to them in being comfortably covered with fog. In fine weather Captain Shepherd was no better navigator than any other man who has grasped the truths of Norie's Epitome. But in a thick grey blanket of fog, even amongst the fisher skippers there were few to equal him. With a sluggish compass on a pole, a handful of tallow smeared into the bottom of a lead, and a nose to sniff the wet air, he could feel his way from any one part of the North Sea waste to any other part with unfaltering accuracy.

At intervals a hand would bring the lead to him, and he would examine and sniff at the arming.--"H'm, sand and small shells, and one of them brown creepy things, and that crisp brass wire smell. We are just off the Sou' East corner of that hole where I carried away a trawl-beam in Nought-one. Tell Olssen to give her half a point more starboard, and take another cast of the lead in twenty minutes, and if there's black sand with these same shells, you needn't bother me for another hour. I guess that half point will just overtake the drift."

So on across his chosen line to the German coast. Captain Shepherd did not trouble with charts. He carried an accurate map of the contours of the North Sea floor in his head, and had resourcefulness enough for all other requirements.

Once he was hailed by a hurrying German destroyer, but had backed away into the fog with a ported helm by the time she had come to look for him, and so escaped inquiries. But the incident gave him an idea. He went to the engine room skylight, and hailed down to one of his impressed stokers.

"Hey, you putty-feller there, what did the Dutchmen do with your fishing gear when they took you?"

"Slung it overboard, sir."

"All of it?"

"All of it except the warps."

"Did they jettison the otter boards?"

"Yes, sir."

"But didn't Captain Argles carry a spare?"

The two stokers consulted. "Yes, sir, there's a spare otter board used as a floor to one of the fish boxes."

"Good," said Captain, and proceeded to get it on deck. "We'll call the depth here twenty-six fathoms, and we'll shackle one of these devil's machines on to the otter board with enough drift of painter to keep it just under the surface when we're towing it out a quarter of a mile a-beam of us. How's that, fellers? Take that mine there marked 32, that's next under the derrick, and handle it like eggs or it'll go off 'pop,' and that'll be the end of our tale, and our job'll be left undone. By Crumbs! fellers, be careful. Keep it in your heads that we've a big stack of these Dutchmen to kill yet before our own time comes."

Success came that very night. From out of the mist and the darkness, a German light cruiser came pelting up at a five and twenty knot gait, with guns nosing round for a prey, and searchlights blazing. She sighted the trawler, and hove-to with engines working, full-speed astern, athwart of the _Bishop Argles'_ trawl warp, bawling questions.

"Yaw! Yaw!" shouted Captain Shepherd in polite response, "No comprenney." And in the meanwhile Mr. McCrae had set the deck winch going, and hove in on the trawl warp till he drew the mine and its murderous strikers into place.

It hit the cruiser squarely beneath her bilge, amidships. It blew her half in two; it exploded some if not all of her boilers, and these (or the mine) exploded her magazines. Heaven yelled to the din of the blasts. The fog lit to a flaming yellow. The _Bishop Argles_ rocked and tossed like a cork in a flooded gutter with the shock, and when the reeking smoke of the melinite blew to him, Joe, the cat, spat and swore with excited frenzy.

"Good puss then," said Captain Shepherd. "Hates a Dutchman, doesn't she, as much as any other Christian would? Get the slack of that trawl warp hove in Mac, will you, and then we'll steam on again. Back to your course, Olssen."

"You're going to pick none of them up then, Skipper?" asked Dick. "Their own boats will have been smashed to sticks."

"I will if they'll give me back my boys--and yours, Dick."

"Aye, I thought you'd be that way," said the old fisherman with a sigh. "Here's a sandwich for you, Skipper. You missed your dinner, so you'll need it. The meat's some kind of liver sausage with black things in it, but I fried it with onions, so you'll never notice the taste. And here's a mug of good hard-boiled tea."

"Thank you, Dick. Now go and take a spell at the wheel and send Olssen to me aft here. And Dick, if he doesn't seem to want to come, or if he shows awkward in anyway, throw him over into the pond."

"Aye," said the burly old man, "I was expecting that too, Skipper. Olssen's a Dutchman of sorts himself."

Olssen came, and was sharply bidden to stand ten feet from his interviewer. "And now, my man," said Captain Shepherd, "as the only feller who speaks German on this packet, why the whiskers didn't you palaver that brass-edged Dutchman when I told you to? Frightened?"

"_Nein_, it was nod dat exactly."

"Kind o' forgot they murdered your brother a few hours ago did you?"

"_Mein Gott, nein._"

"Look here, my feller, what countryman are you? An Olssen should be some sort of a Souwegian."

"_Deutschland uber alles_," murmured Olssen softly, and rushed. Captain Shepherd stepped slightly aside, but left one heavy carpet-slippered foot behind him. Olssen struck wildly, hit nothing, tripped over the foot, and tumbled over the rail into the North Sea: where he remained.

"They're everywhere, those Dutchmen," commented Captain Shepherd patiently, and cut himself tobacco. "They have no feeling for a brother that's been killed or for anybody else. They'll do with a lot of weeding out. I must weed."

* * * * *

It was dark again when the _Bishop Argles_ entered the Heligoland Bight, and she was steaming without lights. Furthermore her engine-room and cabin skylights were covered with tarpaulins, and the binnacle light was muffled so that not the smallest ray could escape seaward. The clothing of her people was dried by now, and Captain Shepherd's carpet slippers showed their colours in full brilliancy. A more desperate venture than the one they were set upon, it would be impossible to find, but none of the bipeds showed emotion. Fishermen are not a demonstrative lot at any time, and these few survivors of what was once a happy family ship were perhaps dulled with grief, and anyway had decided that it was worth dying to encompass a certain ambition against the enemy, and there was an end of it. So they ate, drank, kept watches, and behaved as normal fishermen should behave.

Joe, the cat, was the exception. Joe complained personally and individually to each of the crew in turn (except of course the two pariahs, in the stokehold) and had his neck tickled or his tail pulled in good-tempered toleration. Everybody liked Joe, but nobody was going to be worried too much about his obvious forebodings. He went to McCrae last of all, as that excellent person came up to cool off at the fiddley door. Mr. McCrae was wiping grease from his hands and face with a wad of cotton waste, and thriftily transferring it to his boots.

"Fey," he said to Dick, who had been trying to tempt the cat with a bone. "Fey. That's what ails the puir beastie. I thought second sight of that kind was confined to humans. Here's a proof to the contrary. It would be a vera' interesting topic to write an article on for the _E'mbro' Review_ if ever we get hame again, which we shalln't. Dick, there was an eye in that egg you fried for ma' breakfast this morning. I'll trouble you to pick the meaty bits out in the future. They're ower rich for ma' stomach."

A new danger cropped up as they neared their goal. The British Navy both on the water and below it, though mostly below it, was keeping watch and ward on the German ships that were cooped up inside. Captain Shepherd instinctively decided that the British Navy would not accept him as an ally on any terms whatever. He felt the point of view to be narrow-minded in the highest degree, but saw no means just then of changing it. He had no time at the moment to stop and argue an ethical point with the British Navy. So he did his best to avoid conversation with any of its units.

Twice, snaky destroyers sighted him, and turned in to speak, but the fog held his friend, and his old tactics of going astern on a swerving helm carried him out of reach. He chuckled as one of them let off a rapid stream of gun fire at some other object which they mistook for the trawler amongst the sea-mists.

But it was the submarines that worried Captain Shepherd most. A hand reported "There's a drainpipe cruising alongside us to starboard, Skipper."

Well, there it was, an insignificant periscope, with a trifling wake of white water behind it, and nothing to show if it was British or German, or, for that matter, Venezuelan. There would be a hull down below too, twice as big as the _Bishop Argles_ and full of men only too keen to interfere with his righteous work.

Captain Shepherd at last got seriously annoyed. His red face inside its frame of grizzled whiskers deepened to a fine plum colour. "Hard a port with that helm," he ordered. "Hard over with it now--yes, and steady on that. I'll make that chap dive, or I'll scrape his deckplates."

And dive is what the submarine promptly did. Her periscope slid under water as though it had been pulled down by a string, and the little steamboat lumbered over her without touching, and drove ahead down the North Sea without scathe from her torpedoes. Perhaps they thought she was an ordinary blundering trawler, and it was an even chance whether she was their own friend or an enemy ship. Captain Shepherd could not tell her captain's thoughts. He did not even know if the submarine was a British or a German craft. But they saw her no more. Perhaps, again, when once more she got her eye above water and could see, the _Bishop Argles_ had vanished in the fog. There is a large element of chance in modern sea-warfare. Anyway Captain Shepherd and his fellow fishermen were satisfied. They were fully decided that none of them liked submarines.

But it was to one of these sub-aqueous craft--and the probabilities point to its being German--that they owed their pilotage through the enemy's most dangerous defences. A periscope appeared out of the gloom on their starboard hand, and converged in to their course ahead.

"Follow that feller," said Captain Shepherd to Dick who was in the wheelhouse, and applied himself to a study of the seascape through his night glasses.

"Appears 's if he's trolling for mackerel," observed Dick, as presently the periscope swerved off on a new course.

"Follow every turn he makes, to a fathom," said Captain Shepherd. "We're going through a hedge of mines just now, and I shouldn't like to spoil any of them. So as he's got the chart of how they're laid, and we haven't, we'll just keep narrowly in his wake. But as there may be other Dutchmen wanting to use this same gap in the hedge after us, I reckon we'll just put a bramble or two in it that may scratch them. Mac?"

"Yes, Cap."

"Don't bawl so loud, Mac. That drainpipe affair ahead there may have ears as well as an eye, for all we know. Just get aft, and dump in them boilers numbered 32 and 37 over the counter as quick as you like. The moorings are ready shackled on at the right depth, so there's nothing to delay you."

"Right, Cap," said the engineer, and with the help of a couple of hands set about his work. He spat on each mine for luck as they lowered it over the stern.

"Amazing queer dance this chap is taking us," said Dick, with his eyes on the faint phosphorescence of the periscope's wake. He sawed hard at the wheel, with a busy clatter of cogs. "There you are again. Can you take her through this dance backwards again d'ye think, Skipper?"

"No, Dick. For one reason Mac's sealing up the hole behind us. For another we're--we're going into harbour, Dick. We shall see your boy and mine inside an hour from now. D'ye mind?"

"That's all right, Skipper. You and I have been good shipmates for a long time now, and we never differed on anything that mattered. We shalln't differ on this anyway. I'm damn sorry I cooked so badly for you sometimes, that's all."

"Only person I'm really sorry about is poor old Joe. He's no special quarrel against these Dutchmen, and he knows what's coming as well as any Christian, and hates it fit to burst himself. I did think of heading him up in a cask with a couple of pounds of meat, and setting him adrift to get a chance. But he might fall into Dutchmen's hands, and they're such cruel devils, Dick. After the way they killed my two--my two splendid--oh God damn them, Dick. Joe'll be better off if he stays aboard here and takes his gruel like the rest of us.

"Now let me think"--He conned over in his head the bearings of the zigzag course, and mentally reckoned the length of each leg--"We shall be just over the twenty-five fathom patch, and the North East point of Heligoland will be bearing about due West, or say West 'n by North. H'm." He took a cast of the lead himself to make sure, and smiled with professional appreciation of his own skill when the depth, and the matter brought up by the arming of tallow, proved the accuracy of his mental reckoning.

"You may send her along----" he began, when the deep boom of a big syren close at hand drowned the words. It was answered by another, lighter in note, on the trawler's other side, and two rockets sped up into the fog from two more ships ahead. He put his lips to Dick's hairy ear and bawled. "We're right in amongst the fleet of them, and if we don't look quick, we shalln't get our work done. Gimme that wheel, and do you go aft and tell Mac to get those mines overboard and into the water as quick as he can whip them off the deck."

Somehow, and I hardly think it could have been from the submarine that unconsciously piloted them through the mine-field, the Germans had got wind of an enemy's presence, and an alarm spread round the invisible fleet with furious noise and bustle. Syrens with long blasts and short boomed messages; searchlights made the fog iridescent, but did not penetrate it; and there was all the indescribable turmoil and alarm of a great war fleet caught at anchor by an invisible destroyer that had penetrated their outer and inner defences.

The fishermen were the only people who took it coolly. They had their work to do, and did it, as though it was their daily routine. Mine after mine--German-made--was lifted from their decks and dropped into the still water astern, and Captain Shepherd in the steering pulpit leaned over the spokes of the wheel, and wove his way accurately between the loudest of the noises.

Launches and picket boats at high speed began to pant by them unseen through the fog. One of these presently fouled one of the drifting mines, and blew it up with an appalling explosion. And then some big ship got an attack of the nerves and fired into what necessarily must have been one of her own boats with every light gun she could bring to bear.

"They're beginning to pay," said Captain Shepherd at the wheel. "Oh Lord, give me time to send in more of the bill, and make them pay at least half what's owing." He glanced over his shoulder at the after deck--"Mac."

"Yes, Cap."

"When you get to the last two of them boilers, hang one over each quarter, and tell me."

"Right," said McCrae and waved a hand.

Other spurts of firing burst out, and then there was a crash as some launch's boiler exploded to a shell, and the shrill scream of hurt men.

"The Dutchmen will call this a raid by the whole British Fleet in to-morrow's papers," commented Captain Shepherd. "They'll never own up they've been shooting into their own ships. By whiskers! I shall have to look lively now. All this firing's bringing on a breeze that'll clear the fog. Yes, Mac?"

"They're all over in the ditch, Cap, bar those last two. I've slung one on either quarter, as you said."

"Thank you, Mac." The wheel went over and the _Bishop Argles_ headed for the line of invisible ships, where the noise of defence was loudest.

They sighted her when she was a hundred yards away, and saluted her with a very tornado of fire. Her funnel was shorn off close to the fiddley top by a shell from a great gun, which did not explode there, but acted against a friend in the further line. Rifle bullets and small shells from quick-firers swept over her like a hailstorm, and a score of heavier missiles skated along her rusty iron sides. But she was end-on, and so as a target she was small, and there is no doubt that the gunners were scared and nervous. The German at the range and the German in action are two very different marksmen.

Normally, at ten knots, that hundred yards' run should have taken about one-third of a minute, but some of the shells had penetrated between wind and water and the trawler was sinking fast, and dropping pace every second.

"Go on, old girl," Captain Shepherd urged. "H'ep now, just another score of fathoms, and that's all I ask from you. Joe, you brute, get off my shoulder, or don't claw."

The little steamer with her engines by a marvel untouched, and with her burden of mines by a greater marvel unexploded, drew up to the great battle cruiser with still some free-board showing, and then Captain Shepherd rammed his helm hard-a-port. Her bow almost scraped along the war ship's flank, and her stern swung in. There was a lull in the big gun's fire as they could not be depressed enough to get their sights on her, and the riflemen were firing from the hip and hurting their friends across the way. And then the starboard quarter of the _Bishop Argles_ swung in against the big cruiser's side just below the forward barbettes, and the mine was cracked between them, and a volcano burst forth that rivalled Etna.

Gun ammunition blew up on board of her, and then a magazine. Boilers caught the infection, and then more gun ammunition, and more magazines. The huge ship blew to pieces piecemeal, and sank compartment by compartment. But she went to the sea floor none the less efficiently. And she was one of the biggest cruisers on the world's navy list. As for the trawler, she was spread as mere scum on the troubled waters of the Heligoland Bight.

* * * * *

Now this ought to be the end of the tale. But history compels me to record that Captain Shepherd still resides in England. Odd to relate, he seems well off. In his house is an enlarged photograph of two young men, curiously alike, and in that wooden attitude affected by fishermen when they face the camera. It is framed simply in oak, but the frame is notable. It is studded thickly with curious bronze spikes, which the intelligent observer will recognize, after thought, as once having been carried on the helmet of German infantry men, at the rate of one spike one man.

There are seventy-six spikes round the frame.

A queer-looking tabby tom cat, with one ear missing, and a foreleg that has been broken and badly mended limps round the garden with Captain Shepherd. If you shake anything yellow at this cat, he spits at you.

But how these latter things came to pass cannot be related here. They belong to another tale.

Underneath the portraits is a newspaper cutting, also framed, which runs thus:--

"_New York_. Berlin reports by wireless that a British destroyer flotilla made a determined raid on a German fleet last night, off Heligoland. The British loss was thirteen destroyers sunk and three captured. Their loss in men was very heavy. The Germans had one unimportant cruiser slightly damaged."