Chapter VII: The Lady Killer

The bullet entered the peat wall of the butt with a luscious _plop_.

Captain Kettle continued to keep his eye on the particular bird he had singled from the advancing pack of grouse, swung his gun judiciously ahead of it, and fired. The bird dropped neatly. He got another behind with his second barrel, marked their position with empty cartridge cases on the wall of the butt, and congratulated himself pleasantly on the neat right and left as he reloaded. Then he turned about and inquired tartly from the spaces of the moor as to who the devil had the impudence to shoot at him.

There was no doubt about it being a bullet. In the lamentable event of being peppered by a neighbour in the next butt, the grouse shooter generally registers the marks on his person, never on his butt. Also grouse-butts are more or less in line, and shotgun attacks (however much they can be explained away) are always on the flank. This was from some sector of the rear, as the ugly hole in the wet peat abundantly proved. Further--lady novelists notwithstanding--rifles are not in common use for the purpose of grouse shooting.

"Now I wonder," the little mariner mused, "if that was meant for me?"

The answer came promptly. Another bullet plopped into the butt, and Captain Kettle felt that he would have to miss the rest of that drive. He walked round to the rear of the butt, lit himself a fresh cigar, placed this with its burning end up-wind so that it would emit a noticeable smoke, and crawled away, gun in hand, on a tour of reconnaissance. Further _plops_ announced that the stranger was aiming at the smoke and trying to shoot him through the butt.

The sound of the shots had not come to him, so he knew the sniper must be at a good distance. He crawled first to the next butt, which happened to shelter his host, and made announcement:--

"Mr. Carnforth, sir, don't look up, and please go on shooting. Some blighter in the rear has had the impudence to bombard me with a rifle, and I'm going back to take down his name and address."

"Gee!" said Mr. Martin Carnforth, M.P., "that'll be our friend the spy. He didn't seem to put you off your shooting. That was an uncommon neat right and left. Bit above your average form with grouse."

"I was never able to take up game shooting till I'd left the sea, sir, and on the farm in Wharfedale we have mostly rabbits. I hope I'll be back again for lunch, sir, but if I'm not, please don't wait."

"Can't I come too? The pair of us would have more chance of catching your pal than you will alone. And after all, it is my moor, and so I ought to have a say on what's shot on it."

"Better not, sir. You must keep on remembering that you are a Member of Parliament and your job is to talk, not to do things. I shall be back for that luncheon if it can be managed. I saw a steak and kidney pie put aside for the shooting hut this morning that I want to see more of."

Captain Kettle, however, did not turn up for that pleasant shooting lunch, and his butt was empty for the rest of the day. Carnforth parried inquiries from the other guns about his "naval friend," by suggesting that he had "been called away O.H.M.S. The chap does a good deal in that line on the quiet, I believe, but for the Lord's sake don't say I told you so, or he'll bite my head off. You know what these special service fellows are."

The sailor by means best known to himself, got back to the house in time for dinner that night, dressed in five minutes--for a man who never had much practice, the way he could tie a dress tie bordered on the miraculous--and came down looking as if he had stepped out of a bandbox. He played an extremely good knife and fork at dinner, got outside three-quarters of a bottle '70 port after it, and then settled down in the billiard room (which is really part of the hall) within easy range of a box of Carnforth's five-inch Coronas Colorados. He was smoking the seventh of these when the last of the other guests thought "bed was the best idea that occurred to him just then," and Carnforth mentioned that he "thought the beggars would never go. I'll mix you another whisky and soda. And now kindly tell me what you've been playing at all the afternoon. I bar a man that you've asked to shoot who goes and bags all the sport to himself."

"Well, sir, those peat hags at the back of Cow Ghyll butts weren't intended for a gentleman of your generous figure to scramble through."

"You leave my figure alone, you one-legged ruffian. I'll walk you level from here to Pateley Bridge for a tenner--no, I won't. Go on."

"There's nothing much to tell. I had a general notion of my sniper's direction, and set out to work up to l'ooard of him. There was a bit of a breeze and I thought he would never hear me, and he didn't. He kept on pegging away at that spot below my cigar smoke, in the hopes of hitting me in the back through the butt. When I'd got level with him--and I tell you sir it's cruel hard work on a hot August day making a passage through those hags----"

"Even for a man who hasn't a pot belly."

"For any one, sir. Well, I just worked up to l'ooard, and he spotted me just as I was within gunshot, and started to lift his rifle."

"Go on, man. Go on."

"Oh, I just gave him two barrels of number five. My gun makes a nice large pattern at seventy yards, and I guess I didn't leave much of him without a pellet to remind him he'd been taking liberties. He wore a shooting hat just like yours sir, and a well used burberry."

"Get on, Captain. You're a rotten hand at telling a yarn. Did you gather him?"

"I did not. I just turned tail, and ran away here."

"You what?"

"Ran as near like a hare, sir, as an artificial leg would let me. You see, I gathered from remarks when that hail of shot got home that he was a 'she.' It's one of the many disabilities of the other sex, sir, that when they want to swear, and really have cause, they don't know how to do it efficiently. I'm a modest man, Mr. Carnforth, and I felt too ashamed of listening to stay there any longer. And, of course, the lady wouldn't have been hurt really, only stung at seventy yards, though I once did drop a woodcock with the choke of that gun at seventy-five."

"Hum," said Carnforth, "I don't call this business. You discover that our spy is a woman--which I will grant is a good step in advance. But you have had her in your hands, and let the creature go. Theoretically, in both the Services, men have been hanged for less."

"Well, sir," said Kettle rather stiffly, "I am neither in the Navy nor in the Army, and I don't scrap with women. I leave that for you politicians, sir. I've felt more uncomfortable than you can think, sir, at the idea of having shot her."

"Quite regardless of the trifle that for a good hour she was trying her best to murder you. Highly quixotic, I'm sure. Pity you're not a bachelor, and could end the tale with the usual wedding-bells. I suppose, by the way, she was supremely beautiful?"

"She'd a figure like a pear, and one of the homeliest faces I ever saw. But that doesn't make her any the less woman, sir, or excuse me for filling her with shot-corns."

"Ah," said Carnforth thoughtfully, "I wonder if your lady friend is also a friend of mine. Pear-shaped figure, and an ugly face you say. Pince-nez, by any chance?"

"Plain steel-rimmed spectacles, sir."

"We're getting warmer. A round pug-nose, and a good flourishing black moustache, eh?"

"Her nose might be as you say. As regards the other matter, sir, I should never dream of noticing such a thing on a lady."

Mr. Martin Carnforth hit the edge of the billiard-table and hurt his hand. "I bet a thousand acres of grouse-moor to a keg of sourkraut I know the lady's name and late address. We're getting into deep waters. Did you ever come across Hermann Vogelheimer?"

"I did, sir, half-a-dozen years ago, and wonder I didn't leave my mark on him."

"Oh, what was the trouble?"

"He asked me how much I gave for my K.C.B., the swine."

"And you got furious, and told him such things weren't bought and sold in this country?"

"I don't know how you guessed, Mr. Carnforth, but that is about what I did say, except that I added he was a dirty German Jew, and told him pretty accurately how he'd been bred and where he'd go to later."

"How like you. Well, Captain, he's Sir Hermann Vogelheimer, baronet, to-day, and on paper a pukka Englishman, in spite of the trifle of his accent, and if you call him either German or Jew in public he'll bring an action for libel. I know how much he gave for the title, because I worked the deal myself, as it happened. Our Party funds were dead low just then, and something desperate had to be done. We were past decency at the moment. I remember, when I had to fill in what the beast had done for the country, the only thing I could find to his credit was that he had once given a clock to a mechanics' institute--and I suppressed the detail that he had previously sold them the building site at an exorbitant profit.

"Now, this man had a sort of governess-secretary person called Fräulein Berta Schauer in his household up to the beginning of the war. Since then she has been living about the country on her own, with enough money at her command to make her interesting. You quite take me? She'd no money before the war, or we'll say spent none. Now she's lots, and is very, very kind to soldiers, military doctors, and young subalterns in want of a dinner. Incidentally she is so much like your heroine of the moor, that the coincidence is, to say the least of it--damn that billiard-table, I've smashed my knuckles again."

"We could, of course," suggested Captain Kettle thoughtfully, "haul this Vogelheimer out of his bed some night, and hang him quietly from a tree in his garden if you think fit, sir. I suppose it would be no use giving information to the Government. They'd know he'd parted with money in the past, and would only bleed him for more, and the spy business would not be touched."

Carnforth grinned. "You've a delightfully clear opinion about politicians, Captain. I wouldn't go so far as to agree with you that the Government would proceed to blackmail our man if they had the chance, but I fancy they're mindful of past favours. Anyway, he isn't interned, and a child can see he ought to be. But, of course, that's the ordinary rule. We only intern poor Germans, and those who don't subscribe to our Party funds. Moreover, you are going a bit too fast. We've no evidence that the immaculate Sir Hermann is running this spy game, and as he is one of the most capable men in Great Britain at this minute, it's heavy odds we don't find any evidence. But if we keep a watchful eye on your shot-pocked Fräulein Schauer----"

"You'll excuse me, Mr. Carnforth, sir, but I don't scrap with women, and I've done that one more damage than I care about already. With your leave, I'm going to drop the whole business. I'll just take another cigar with me for before breakfast, and now I'll turn in."

Carnforth watched his guest as he stumped up the stairs at the other side of the hall. "Go to sleep by all means for the present, and I'll get busy. Later, if you're wanted, and the intrusive petticoat is wafted away from your modest sight, you'll help most efficiently. I never came across a man who hated Germans--or Dutchmen, as you will persist in calling them--more efficiently. You might not make a good minister, but if they had you in the Cabinet you'd have a big value in killing off the dangerous ones. Um! I hate travelling at night, but I fancy a fifty--no, it'll be a seventy-mile motor run will have its uses just now. Nice work for a middle-aged gentleman after a hard day's grouse shooting. Well, I shall probably breakfast a bit late, that's all."

The apologetic butler who came into Captain Kettle's room at five o'clock next morning was rather surprised to find any guest in the house rouse so suddenly into perfect wakefulness. He was unused to the habits of sailors, but being the complete butler he did not flicker so much as the eyebrow of surprise. He said with stolid and perfect courtesy, "The Master telephones, sir, that he would be obliged if you would meet him at Fordham as soon as you can get there. It is about eighty miles. If you have any doubt about going, I was to mention that without your help there will be three ships of the British Navy sunk within four hours' time. I shall have our big Napier ready for you, sir, by the time you are dressed."

"Always pleased to give the Navy a leg up," said the mariner briskly. "Just hand me that wooden leg out of the portmanteau, will you? No, not the one I wore yesterday. Now go and get that car. I'll be at the front door as soon as it is round."

The big car hurtled out coastwards through the end of the autumn night, and quickened as dawn made the roads more clear. The driver flicked out his electrics and turned to his passenger. "If you're not nervous, Sir Owen, I can open her up a bit now."

"I am always nervous with these beastly road-engines," Captain Kettle admitted, "when I'm not conning them myself, but push her along, my lad. The tune of this car up to now has fitted in with 'Greenland's Icy Mountains,' and I suppose you'll hit it up now to the air of the 'Turkish Patrol,' and that will spoil the rhythm of some poetry I was making. But don't mind that. I'm not the man to let pleasure stand in the way of business."

They met Carnforth half-a-dozen miles outside Fordham, the big grey car drawn up at a crossroads inn advertising his whereabouts. It was six-thirty in the morning, and he was eating ham and eggs and drinking beer. Also he was in dress clothes, unshaven, and the worse for wear.

"You look as if you have been climbing trees, sir," said Captain Kettle, with all a tidy man's disgust for the dishevelled.

"It was walls and a fall-pipe, and I've broken all my nails and the knee of one of my trousers. You needn't turn up your nose at my frugal meal; it's supper for me, not breakfast. Have some?"

"Thank you, sir, I think I will. Your man has scared me so with the pace he's driven, I'm hungry enough to eat two breakfasts. But I expected to meet you at the coast, sir. Your message mentioned something about giving a leg up to the Navy."

"All in good time. I suppose you don't know anything about wireless? A bit since your day, eh?"

The little sailor drew himself up stiffly. "I keep myself up to date, sir. I take in every issue of the _Syren and Shipping_ and the _Patent Medicine Recorder_ and read through every word of both, advertisements included. And as it happened, for my last Christmas holiday, I took a run across the Western Ocean in a boat fitted with wireless to see how it worked. A Mr. McTodd, a retired sea-going engineer of my acquaintance, was interested in her as a shareholder, and gave me every facility. He came too. He----" Captain Kettle was evidently on the brink of disclosures, but bit them off with a firm lip. "He and I came home by different boats."

"Well, there's wireless and wireless, and I fancy the instalment I'm nosing after isn't the usual sort. I put the Home Office on to an instalment like it once before. They (after I began to get nasty) discovered it wasn't their job, and handed me on to the Post Office. The Post Office went to sleep over it for three weeks, and then when I roused them by methods I wouldn't like to describe to you, said they'd taken tests and proved that no wireless messages had been sent or received from the area under discussion. I didn't believe them. But they'd wasted two months of valuable time, and when their final report came, my birds had got frightened and bolted. Now we can't afford to be hung up like that again. This is business, and one can't expect business from a Government office."

"I've known the Board of Trade get busy quick enough, sir," said Kettle rather bitterly. "Is this wireless you're after some new patent?

"I can only guess, but I've a notion it's an improvement on a type that was talked about in the text-books before the Marconi sort was heard of."

"You're rather vague, sir."

"I am. But I'm open to bet seven years' penal servitude to nothing I'm right."

Captain Kettle looked puzzled. "I don't take you, sir."

"What I'm going to do within the next half-hour--and what you can chip in at if you like--will be put down as armed burglary of Sir Hermann Vogelheimer's house, if I'm wrong. If we're right, and save a nice little squadron of British ships, probably nothing will be said about the method. We shan't be thanked anyway. Here are a few more details," said Carnforth, and gave them. "Question is, are you going to risk coming?"

Captain Kettle tried to look disturbed and failed. "It seems to me more than a one-man job, sir, and I think perhaps it would be better I should come and stand by in case of trouble, especially as you can guarantee I shan't see Miss Schauer. It would be most embarrassing to meet that lady with my shot-corns still making her feel sore. I've brought along that automatic you lent me yesterday, though I must say my old Hopkins-Allen .380 feels more homelike."

At this point unfortunately a gap occurs in history. Captain Kettle refuses to fill it. Mr. Martin Carnforth, M.P., for sound reasons, I cannot get at. I suppose the pair of them raided the house of Sir Hermann Vogelheimer in broad daylight and made that Teutonic baronet squeal. I say I suppose they did this, because when I suggested it Captain Kettle surreptitiously licked his lips. But he provided no details, either for publication or for anything else. As a side issue, I did get an inkling once of the method Vogelheimer used for signalling. We were talking of wireless, and I said it was odd that the heat-ray method had never been developed.

"That's all you know about it, my lad," Kettle snapped. "Get a multiple arc with plenty of juice at the back of it, filter out the light with a screen, and you can send messages down a heat ray that a telephonic nerve can pick up thirty miles away. That's the way Vogel----"

"Who did you say?"

"No one. But the thing's been done. That you can take from me. I've seen it." And he then proceeded to give me a precis of his last week's sermon to the Wharfedale Particular Methodists by way of changing the subject.

A gap, as I say, mutilates the sequence, and I can only take up events again on a particularly unpleasant timber-laden barquentine of Swedish register somewhere in the North Sea. The unfortunate vessel advertised herself to the waters at large as a derelict. Her crew had been driven from her by Germans, and a bomb had done its best to sink her. But a lading of timber buoyed her up, and she floated dismantled, bulwarkless, and waterlogged, as a menace to shipping, and a gossiping spot for gulls.

In spite of latitude and longitude given, and elaborate calculations for current drift and wind drift, Captain Kettle spent a whole day searching the grey rollers of the North Sea before he found her, and one man had a leg smashed in the subsequent transhipment of the three-inch gun.

Where the gun came from I do not know, but suspect Carnforth. Mr. Martin Carnforth, M.P., had been in the gun-running business before, as has been recorded, and presumably knew where to procure weapons when needed, even though officially such a thing was not to be got for love or money by anyone outside the two Services. Anyway, there the gun was; the latest thing; firing from a shoulder-piece and delicately balanced by recoil cylinders; fitted with an ample shield; and capable, with efficient loading, of getting off twenty unpleasant shells per minute. Most of the barquentine's deckload had survived its wartime experiences, and Kettle's first orders were directed to digging a gunpit out of this.

When the tender steamed away, there were three of them left besides himself, to wit, Carnforth and two other grouse-shooters, one a supercilious barrister, and the other a florid stockbroker, and the three instinctively dropped under the little sailor's orders. They tore at the deals till their hands bled, and their wrists were full of splinters; they sweated at augers; they strained at spanners; they worked with panting fury till they had got their gun bolted down, with its slim store of shells laid handy.

For a minute they stood round, thawing their stiff muscles, and admiring their work.

"Filthy life sailors must lead," commented the barrister.

"By James, you're right," said Captain Kettle, "and they deserve a sight more consideration than they get."

"Well," said the stockbroker, "here's hoping there's soon a slump in submarines; I say, Captain, haven't we earned a drink?"

The cabin aft was afloat, the forecastle the same, and the galley, a green-painted wooden box, clamped down to the decks by an iron strap, was the only place of shelter. A shrewd rain-laden breeze was blowing from the eastward, and the water-logged derelict behaved like a half-tide rock. Her four inhabitants were bone-weary, sodden wet, icily cold. But only two could shelter in the galley at a time, and that without fire. Captain Kettle ordained that there should be always two on watch, and he forbade the showing of smoke or any other ensign of human occupancy.

The three-inch gun was shrouded from the gaze of the gulls and others by the tattered and sodden remains of a main-topmast staysail. This flapped about artistically between wind and water, and would appear to the inquirer (when one arrived) as the piece of genuine wreckage it really was. The gunpit and this erratic canvas also gave some shelter to the officer and man of the watch, but as the North Sea ebbed and flowed through the floor of the pit, or gushed in (when it felt inclined) over its edges, the place, as a sentry-box was not without its inconveniences.

"I don't mind eating soaked biscuit and sardine," said Carnforth, "but even my stomach refuses sea-water and whisky. Can't you screw her round head to wind, somehow, Captain? This wallowing in the trough is the very devil. Incidentally, it will make me sea-sick soon."

"But it looks natural, and that's what we needed. Believe me, sir, these Dutchmen spot the least thing nowadays that's suspicious. They're getting the savvy of white men. Mind you don't get a clip on the head from one of the hanks of that staysail, Mr. Carnforth. Duck, sir. By James, that one nearly flicked your brains out. You should take care. You must remember, sir, that if these Dutch submarines come up, as arranged, you'll be needed presently, and it's shirking your duty if you get killed beforehand."

The autumn night wore through, cold, windy, and bitter, but, with a niggard dawn, the wind eased, and grey pallisades of rain hedged the derelict into a narrow circus of sullenly rolling water. Gulls mewed at them from the ruined fore-top.

Captain Kettle rubbed his wet hands appreciatively. "Perfect weather, isn't it, Mr. Carnforth? You'd like more sporting shooting, I know. But with this thickness they'll have to come close so as to pick up their mark, and we can pot them with our gun like sitting rabbits. I'm not like you, sir; I'm not out for sport just now; what I want is to make a big bag of good Germans. The only thing I can't understand is why this floating wreck should be set out as a rendezvous. A sailor, if he wanted to make an appointment in the middle of the North Sea, would just give a latitude and longitude."

Carnforth chuckled. "But you see neither the eminent Sir Hermann nor his lady friend that we agree to call Miss Schauer are sailors."

"You never mentioned, sir," said Kettle disgustedly, "that the lady was in it."

"Forgot," said Carnforth, with complete absence of truth. "You're so shy of petticoats, most eminent Captain, I thought you'd wriggle out of the job if you knew. Gee! Look! That chap's coming down on top of us."

A black Norwegian collier, with stump top-masts, poked her ugly dray-horse bows out of the grey sea mist, and bore down stolidly and squarely on to them. The derelict was helpless. There did not seem a possibility that she could escape destruction. And the chances were a hundred to one that if she were hit she would scrape the bottom off the collier and take her to the North Sea floor in convoy. Even the sea-fowl got scared, and flew away.

The mountainous bows, yawning wildly to the seas, made for them as if drawn by a wire, and the nerve of Martin Carnforth, M.P., gave way. He leapt to his feet and tried to shout a warning. But with a cat's quickness Kettle's knees were against his shoulder-blades, and Kettle's cold, wet right hand clapped hard over his mouth, and Martin Carnforth, M.P., flopped back into the sea-water at the bottom of the gun-pit.

The staysail bellied and snapped above them, and the look-out on the collier (who then for the first time woke up) saw only a timber-laden derelict, deserted even by the sea-birds. He made swift outcry, and the mechanism, human and mechanical, on the bridge responded. The clumsy bows, ducking and curtsying, took a slow sheer to port, and missed the barquentine's splintering sides by a short fathom.

The ponderous stern bore in to starboard and grazed the derelict's quarter. The water from her condenser sluiced along the deck-load. The popple of her wake set the barquentine dancing like a cork till she had pulled out through the palings of the rain, and vanished on the trail of her own inconsiderable affairs.

"Beg your pardon, sir," said Captain Kettle, getting off his friend's head.

"Don't mention it. Gee! Those other two chaps in the galley must have nerves! They never let up a whimper. I'm getting jumpy. Must be growing old."

"The other two gentlemen are both asleep, sir. The thin, superior one's head had slid off (when I looked in the galley last) on to a piece of beef that hadn't been fresh for a fortnight, and the stockbroker must be a Tynesider from the homely way he's snuggled down amongst the coals. Well, sir, we don't count near squeaks at sea. There aren't enough log-books made to enter them up. I wish you'd finish what you were saying about Vogelheimer when that coal-boat broke you off."

"The Admiralty have been allowed to pick up an ordinary wireless which let out that a German cruiser squadron was to rendezvous where we are now, preparatory to a raid on Scarboro'. It was judged, rightly enough, that some British ships would be sent to attend to them. Vogelheimer sent all this news down his own heat-ray wireless (that we thickheaded British can't tap), and I guess it was picked up by a German submarine thirty miles out at sea. I'm not sure about that, you understand; but it was received by somebody, because I heard it acknowledged myself whilst I was in the room. And then, as you know, we got spotted, and you had your little interview with Vogelheimer when he rushed out on to the leads to see who his callers were. I can guarantee I smashed their wireless most efficiently, and, though the operator bolted----"

"The operator, sir?"

"Well, it was your shot-marked friend. Lord, Captain, you did pepper her, to judge by the marks! She ran like an animated pear when she saw me--thought I'd another shot-gun, I suppose. And as I guessed she was too scared to pull up this side of a hundred miles, I let her go. Other things were too pressing. And besides, I knew your sentiments."

"I don't consider you've treated me fairly in this matter, sir."

Carnforth grinned. "I haven't. You see, I wanted to use you, and, knowing your scruples, I just circumnavigated them most unscrupulously. I've got you out here. British cruisers are probably coming, though I hope they change their minds or miss their way, but German submarines are going to turn up within the next hour or so, for an absolute certainty. We shall probably get scuppered ourselves before lunch-time, but if we send plenty of Germans before us into the Shades, I shan't mind that much. It will be a more decent ending than most Members of Parliament acquire."

"Yes, sir, quite so, and you and the other two gentlemen may die as arranged. But, by James! I'm not out in the wet old North Sea to get killed. You'll see I shall do all that's needful, and get home again to Lady Kettle as promised to her. If you go into these little affairs with an appointment with your wife in your pocket-book, when you've carried them through successfully you keep that appointment, and go round the garden with her quite pleasantly, and see the roses that have grown since you've been away, and arrange the date when you'll dig the potatoes and put them in a pie. There was something that made me feel a bit like former times, Mr. Carnforth, that I saw just inside the main companion."

"What was that?"

"An accordion, sir--the Old Man's, possibly, or perhaps Mr. Mate's. It was coming unstuck with the wet, and every other note was dumb. But it would be very pleasant to squeeze music out of an accordion again. You see, sir, since we've been prosperous and had the harmonium in the house, Lady Kettle says accordions are low. She won't try to play the bigger machine herself, and I can't learn, and my daughter, Mrs. Hunter, that had such splendid lessons on it from the master in Skipton, is seldom with us nowadays. So you see, we get no music except what that little cat from down the dale pumps out in chapel on Sundays. She always plays the hymns I hate, and when I try to get her to put through one with a lift on it, she's always pat with an excuse.---- My great James, sir, stand-by! There's another steamboat coming--a big fellow and in a hurry, by the sound of his propeller. Down under the staysail, sir--down under the staysail, I say--or you'll get another thick ear!"

It was no black-painted collier this time that bore down upon them, but a vast steel ship, painted, it seemed, to the very tint of the rain-mists themselves. She was unsubstantial, and yet solid; a ghost ship, and yet grinning with guns; carrying no man in open sight, yet awake enough to train a score of ugly muzzles on the barquentine in case of accident.

She was twenty thousand tons of hate embodied in hardened steel, and she slid in and out of their narrow, rain-swept horizon at the pace of an ordinary train. Captain Kettle peered at her from under the flapping edge of the staysail, and tugged perplexedly at his red torpedo beard.

"My great James! Mr. Carnforth, what kind of a mess have we here? That duck's not Dutch any more than she's English."

"French, she looked to me."

"French all over. I never saw anything more French in my life. But what's she doing out here?"

"Skipper felt he'd like a cod steak for breakfast, so they just slipped across to the Dogger for an evening's fishing."

"You've a great imagination, sir. I suppose you need it in Parliament. But upon my sam, although the explanation's sheer foolishness, I can't think of a better. Unless----"

"Well? Unless what?"

"Nothing, sir."

"Unless our pear-shaped friend has got another move on her were you going to say?"

"I was, as it happened. But I shan't interfere with her further. It makes me hot, Mr. Carnforth, to think of the damage I've done to that lady already."

"Anyway, she's out of our range at the moment. By God, though, if that woman's had the cleverness to send French ships into the trap as well as British, she's got some energy, and some tackle to use it with. She----"

"Here they are, sir, at last! Slip you forrard to the galley and rouse up the other two. Keep out of sight going. You must crawl behind those deals. And keep out of sight when you are there till you hear me whang off the first shot. It's all in with these Dutchmen now, and I'm not going to let the swine hit first, if it can be avoided. But when you hear the bang, run aft to here, all three of you, for all you're worth. Got that?"

"Aye, aye, sir," said Martin Carnforth, M.P., and crawled away on the errand as briskly as his portliness would permit.

The German submarine came on with her decks just clear of the water, and her bows nodding over or nosing through the seas. She had a gun on her foredeck and another aft, and high-booted men stood alertly beside each, with the water swirling between-whiles up to their knees. A conning-tower like a wedding-cake decorated her amidships, with a periscope, and a wireless mast that emitted a pennon of stinking smoke. Three bearded dirty men occupied the top of the conning-tower. Captain Kettle, clapped snugly into the shoulder-piece of his gun, slipped down his sights to point-blank, and took steady aim at the centre of where that wedding-cake joined the hull.

"If they weren't these fancy new kind of Dutchmen," said Captain Kettle as he pressed home his trigger, "it wouldn't be fair to shoot them sitting like this. By James, that joker's got it where the chicken got the axe--right in the neck."

The 3-inch shell, discharged at some forty yards, distance, tore through the plating of the conning-tower as though it had been biscuit-tin, and exploded inside. The conning-tower opened like an expanding lily. The men on the top of it disappeared into mist. The men below were involved in what appeared to be a secondary explosion. The men on the fore and after decks stuck grimly to their guns, and fired them in the face of death--and fired them without result.

They had no time to reload; their ship was sinking bodily beneath them; and into a sea, iridescent with escaping fuel oil, they were presently swept, together with scalded survivors escaping from below. Carnforth and his two friends, racing along from the galley to join Kettle in the gunpit, stopped in their stride, and commenced throwing deals overboard, with the Englishman's ordinary instinct for saving life. Then out of the rain-mist whiz-crash came a shell, and whiz-crash came another, and the wet air was full of hissing splinters as these exploded amongst the deals.

"By James, Mr. Carnforth," Kettle called out, "if you don't carry out my orders, I'll attend to you later. Here's submarine number two arriving, and I've got to load this gun for myself like a common deckhand. By James, sir, I'm captain of this packet, and you've got to remember it. Come away aft here, one-time."

Carnforth and the barrister obeyed the call. The plump stockbroker stayed behind, spread out in a limp heap on the derelict's deckload.

The amateurs loaded briskly and shot well. The professionals (despite an austere drill) loaded better and shot more accurately. Moreover, they had two guns to the barquentine's one, and they were firing at a background that splintered at a touch and spread a torrent of horror, whilst Kettle was aiming at chilled steel plates.

The Germans did not miss; the derelict sang with splinters that were potent for death; but they could not sink her. Captain Kettle, on his part, did not miss either; but he could not hit a vital part. He punctured an oil locker on the submarine's ribs, and the sullen North Sea swell was covered with more iridescence. He cut away the wireless mast, and the fumes of burnt lubricating oil stank from the conning-tower level. He swept one of the after-gun crew into space. But he could not give the submarine a mortal hit. And in the meanwhile the unsinkable barquentine was disintegrating into planks, the barrister had collapsed badly hit, and Carnforth was white and wounded. Captain Kettle cursed his aim, re-lit his cigar whilst a 3-inch shell burst noisily alongside of him, and shot doggedly on.

Then the unexpected happened.

All this time the submarine had been fighting him under way, circling the derelict at some 18 knots, and offering a difficult target. Her friends in submarine number one, that Carnforth and the others had tried to succour, were still squattering in the water, but they did not strike submarine number two as valuable. They were out of action for the time being, and submarine number two ignored them as though they had been so many swimming gulls. There was more joy for submarine number two in killing three Britons in a water-logged derelict timber ship than in saving fifteen compatriots. And then with a hiccough her Diesel engines struck work (from some cause unknown), and she lost way.

The commanding officer of submarine number two was a man of resource. He had saved his torpedoes up to now for worthier game, but when the engine trouble showed itself, and while he had still got steerage way, he put down his helm. If he could not sink this nuisance of the seas by shell fire, at least he could blow her into matchwood with a 15-inch torpedo.

But then by a beautiful shot--Carnforth, who knew Kettle's shooting, always declared it was a fluke--the little sailor got in first. Submarine number two was end on, and presented her smallest possible target, but he hit her just as one of the stern torpedo-tubes was being fired, and the torpedo exploded--inboard.

There were no swimmers from submarine number two, and by this time those from number one had all disappeared under the slimy oil.

Captain Kettle knocked the ash from his cigar, and went to look at his friends. The stockbroker was dead. He wore on his face the pleased grin of a man who was satisfied with the end of life as he had seen it.

The barrister had a carotid artery slit through by a splinter. He, also, could not last long. Captain Kettle took off his hat. "Any message, sir?" he asked softly.

"_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._"

"I beg your pardon, sir. I didn't quite catch?"

The barrister gave the ghost of a superior smile. "I'm afraid it's above your head, my man," said he, and dropped back into unconsciousness.

Mr. Martin Carnforth, M.P., in the shocking remains of what was once evening dress, was a more profitable patient. He had been merely stunned by one of the all-pervading splinters, and North Sea water, strenuously applied, brought him round.

A British destroyer storming up at 30 knots some hours later found a small man in farmery-looking clothes and a red torpedo beard, a wounded man who looked like a rag-picker, and two dead on a shattered derelict barquentine. The farmer was playing "As pants the hart for cooling streams," on a patched-up accordion with three dumb notes, to an audience of three kittiwakes and a lesser black-backed gull.

The destroyer bustled up alongside with much business-like confusion, took off the humans and continued her way. The Lieutenant-Commander, who wore a woollen comforter of a startling pink, and a black smudge on his nose, stared hard at Captain Kettle, and asked his name.

"I know your face," said the Lieutenant-Commander. "It's like some one I've seen in a magazine illustration."

"He is generally known as the Lady killer," said Carnforth.

The little sailor turned on him with a sudden ferocity. "I'm more ashamed of what I did to that poor stout woman than I can say, sir, and if you make a song about it, I'll attend to you in a way you'll remember for the rest of your natural life."

"What-ho!" said the Lieutenant-Commander. "Don't let me butt into anybody's private divorce case. Got enough of my own on hand, thanks. Come below and have some hot cocoa. You look as cold and wet as a brace of snipe. Step down into the parlour and hear all the news. Perhaps you can help to solve the latest problem they've got ashore: 'Who hanged Sir Hermann Vogelheimer?'"