I had Chips spike the stand down to the deck of the chart-house, and while he was doing this, I turned all hands on to the job of shifting several tons of corrugated galvanised iron roofing from number four hatch. We were carrying five hundred tons of this, and I remembered it suddenly.
I was packed in quarter-ton slabs, with tarpaper between, and I felt as pleased as a pig with a new hind leg when I remembered it. I sent for Mac and suggested that he shove some loads of it down the ash-hoists, and stow it between the starboard boiler and the side of the ship. It should keep anything out, if only he got enough of it packed around.
Mac was positively ecstatic with delight at the notion, for he’d been worrying about his boilers all the time.
Meanwhile, I had all my deck-hands lumping it up amidships and storing it around the chart-house—all except the doorways, and these I protected as much as possible by laying the stuff down on its side, so as to protect the base of the gun—not to mention my legs!
When I’d enough of the stuff packed around the house to keep out a modest fifteen-inch shell, I put one of our mooring-chains round and round the lot waist high, and set it up taut with a handy-billy tackle to hold the lot in place. It was quite a job getting in and out of the chart-house! Finally, to hide my patent armour-plate, I made the hands spread the poop awning over the top of the chart-house, as if to dry, so that it hung down and covered everything except the upper half of the starboard door, which I meant to keep closed until the last moment, so as to have the gun hid.
Then I made everyone turn-to and give Mac a hand to finish getting his engines and boilers protected, and just as Mac sung out that we could do no more, unless it was pray harder than he was doing, which he didn’t think possible, Mr. Perry, whom I’d told to stay on the deck bridge, sent down word that the Ballett liner was almost out of sight, and the submarine seemed to have given up the chance and be steering for us at full speed.
I ran up on deck to the bridge.
“Get those flag-hoists up,” I said. “I’m not going to use the wireless. He’ll ask too many questions, and I may get tripped and make him suspicious. If he notices the aerials he may think it’s broken down, and that we’re forced to use the flag-hoists instead. And, of course, he’ll never answer you.
“All you men on deck!” I said; “get down into number four hold out of the way. Stow that galvanised iron round you. You’ll be safe down there. If I whistle, come up on the run. The Steward will serve out grog to you. You’ve worked well, men. Now get a move on you, my lads. Take a chain-hook each, or anything hefty you can find, and nurse it till you hear from me. Don’t smoke.... Gatley, I shall want you in the chart-house.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” he said, and went. Then I turned to Mac and gave him some final instructions that made his eyes shine like razors.
“George! I’d do it, if I was to die next minute!” he said. “The murdering brutes! You leave it to me. But I’ll look to you to give the word.”
“I’ll blow my whistle twice,” I said. “Then you’ll know what to do!”
I left him bellowing orders to his “black squad,” and raced up to the chart-house.
The next hour held life or death for every man of us. And I meant it to be LIFE!
“I’ll take the bridge,” I told Andrews. “You’d better stay. I may want you. There’s that Zilchrist at the wheel. I fancy he’s got nerve enough to stick here till I tell him to shunt. So I guess we’re all right at present....Mr. Perry, you get into my chart-house with Gatley and stand by to lend him a hand. Mac’s sending me up the Second Engineer to stand by handy, in case anything goes wrong with the gun. Keep the port door open for the Mate and me, in case we have to do a hefty bunk for shelter.... Got your revolvers?”
“Yes, Sir,” replied both men, and hauled them out to show me.
“That’s all right,” I said, “but mind, no shooting until I give the word. If we bungle this job it’s going to be Kingdom-Come for all of us inside the next forty or fifty minutes, so go wisely!”
When I got back to the bridge I reached for my glasses, meaning to take a look around to locate the submarine again, for I’d long ago ordered the lookout down from aloft.
But there was no need now for glasses to spot the brute. She was less than two miles away, fully unsubmerged.
I saw now that she had two conning-towers, with a narrow platform or deck reaching between them, well up above the sea. There were about a dozen men on this platform, and away foreside of the forrard conning-tower there was another bunch of men.
When I got the glasses focused on them I saw that they were busy round a long gun, that looked like a twenty-four or twenty-five pound quick-firer. They were getting ready for their beautiful murder game. I heard my First Mate swear under his breath as he spotted what they were up to. Then, suddenly, he called out:
“Look out, Sir!”
I had seen the same thing. They had swung the gun around until it looked to be pointing right at us. Curiously enough, I had a feeling it would hit the Mate, and it was plain that he felt I was the one in most danger. The psychology of this is curious.
There came a quick, reddish flash, and then we saw that the gun had been trained nowhere at us, but a little ahead of the ship, for a shot struck the sea, about twenty fathoms in front of our bows, and kicked the spray fifty feet in the air. Directly afterwards came the intensely harsh, sharp bang of the gun, and I knew the fight was on.
“Ring down to ‘stop,’ Mr. Alfred,” I said. “We’ll not give the beggar any unnecessary excuse to start messing up the engine-room.”
The Mate made one dash at the engine-room telegraph, pumped the lever back and forth quickly, and brought it over to “Stop.”
The answer came “by return,” and almost in the same instant the screw stopped turning. I guess Mac must have been waiting with his hand on the throttle, for he was mighty anxious not to invite shell practice among his boilers and machinery. And I don’t blame him either! A shell in the boilers means just plain hell, with frills.
However, their lordships in the submarine were obviously of the “must-be-obeyed” kind, as they proceeded to prove instanter.
You see, naturally, a Bessel carries some headway on her for a couple of minutes after stopping her engines. But the brutes chose to ignore this fact. They had not hoisted the “heave-to” signal before firing the gun, and only now did they do so. The following instant there was a second flash from the gun, and then crash, and a blaze of red fire on our starboard side. The whole vessel quivered fore and aft. The devils had fired a live shell slam into our broadside just where they guessed our engines to be.
I rushed to the side and stared over. There was a whopping great tear in our plates, about three feet by two feet, right opposite the engine-room, but fortunately well above the water-line. I guessed however, this had been no attempt to sink us; nor should we be sunk until they had been aboard for the “cash” I’d advertised so widely. They were merely being a little masterful.
I ran to the telephone and ’phoned down to Mac, but felt better when I heard that my proposal had saved the engines, for the shell had been held back by the shield of coal which Mac had built at my suggestion.
“The rotten cowards!” said Mr. Alfred. “The darned rotten cowards!”
He was leaning over the end of the bridge beside me, looking almost absurdly wrathful.
“I agree, Mister,” I said “and if I’m not mistaken they’ll give us one or two more, just for the sheer pleasure of the thing.... Ah! I thought so!”
For as I spoke I caught the flash of the gun again; and then, abruptly, there was a flash all round the capstan on our fo’cas’le head, and a stupendous bang. Then a tremendous splash over on the port side of the ship.
There was a cloud of black smoke for a couple of seconds where the shell had struck, but this cleared, and then I saw we were minus the capstan; also there were some flames starting in the deck of the fo’cas’le head.
“Mister Alfred,” I
said, “call up a couple of the men and go forrard and shove some water over that fire. Fill all the deck buckets and leave them handy on the main-deck.”
“Very good, Sir,” said Mr. Alfred, and went away on the job. As he ran down the starboard steps the gun on the big submarine flashed out again, and the next instant they’d punched as pretty a round whole in our foremast as you’d want to see; only, for some reason, the shell never exploded. When the shells were coming I noticed they made a queer noise, like “Meeeee,” which always seemed to alter into “Meeeee-oooooo-oooww” as the shell “arrived.” Then, of course, the smash of the explosion. Only, in the case of this last shell, it made only a queer, curious sort of “zip” when it struck the mast, and afterwards I saw it strike the water and chuck up a great spout of sea and spray about a mile away to port. But the most curious effect was the way the steel mast acted after the blow. It vibrated just like a gigantic tuning-fork, and the whole ship seemed to thrill and thrum to it for nearly half a minute; but, of course, there was no sound that we could hear.
After the first, second, and third shots (which I fancy were fired partly for sheer pride of marksmanship and partly to cower us to a suitable degree of shaky-kneedness), there were no more gun-shots. Instead, the thumping great submarine came straight for us at top speed, about eighteen knots, I should guess, with the sea one white boil over her fore whaleback. In less than ten minutes she was within half a mile of us, and I can tell you I thrilled—a sort of mad excitement—all down my spine when I realised that in another minute she would be near enough for us to make a bit of a show for our lives; that is, if our gun had any sort of punch at all, and if Gatley really knew his business and could get the hang of her in time to get a shot home where it would do the most good—or harm!
Mr. Alfred was back now from putting out the fire and filling the deck buckets. He had sent the men down number three hatch again, and he came to report about the fore-capstan. I didn’t want to hear about the fore-capstan, though, and I didn’t wait for the details, but sent him off to my chart-house at a run to tell Gatley not to open fire, whatever he did, until I gave the word.
At first my notion had been to open fire as soon as ever the submarine was well within our range; but now I’d a different plan. I knew they’d be after that “fairy-gold” of ours, and that would mean they’d have to put a boat in the water and come aboard. If they did this, they’d certainly run up quite near, which would be all to our advantage; and also there would be some diversion among them when they were getting the boat out (I know what launching a boat from a submarine means). And in the midst of that same diversion we might get a useful shot or two home before they knew what was troubling their innocent little lives.
On she came, right up to within two hundred fathoms of us; then cut off her spark and came in, with the way she had on her, until she rounded-to, flat on our starboard beam, less than fifty fathoms away.
Then came the next move, as smart as you like. A long hatch opened, right under the bridge-deck between the two conning-towers. Two men reached down into the hatch and brought out a couple of tackles, which they hooked to ring-bolts in the under part of the bridge-deck.
Three men tailed on then to each tackle, and up came as bonny a Berthon collapsible boat as ever I’ve seen. They ran the tackles out on runners that were fixed in under the bridge-deck until the collapsible was clear of the open hatch. It was a grand moment, but I was so darned interested I forgot to sing out to Gatley to let drive! They spread the boat, and a man jumped in, and then they slid her down the rounded side of the submarine into the water. They chucked off the tackles and held her by the painter, while a very unshaven officer and eight men tumbled into her, all armed with revolvers and swords. The painter was cast off, and they out oars to start for my ship.
And then, suddenly, I realised that I was letting the ideal moment go.
“Gatley!” I roared out; “Gatley, FIRE!”
I heard the starboard door of my chart-house fly open, and, almost simultaneously, there came a devil of a BANG, and then a complete silence, except for someone swearing in the chart-house.
The shell from our gun missed the submarine by yards. Went right over her, in fact, and kicked up a fine healthy spout of sea-water, which suggested that the gun had got plenty of punch, if we could only apply it where it was badly needed—from our point of view!
The people aboard the submarine looked absolutely stupefied for a moment or two. I was watching them through my glasses. If an infant cow had made a likely try at tossing the boss bull of the herd, he couldn’t have looked more bewildered than did that lot of German scuttlers. And the best of it was, as I twigged at once, they couldn’t decide at all which part of the ship the shot had been fired from, for the awning, hanging loosely over the chart-house, more than half hid the open doorway, and the corrugated iron across the lower part hid a good deal of the rest.
“For the Lord’s sake, shoot, Gatley!” I sung out, in more of a sweat than I should have thought possible. “You’re going to lose the chance!”
That seemed to put some movement into the Germans, for they were near enough to hear my voice easily, and the next thing I knew was: Crack! Crack! Crack! The men in the collapsible were loosing off their rifles at me, and the air was full of the “whang” of their confounded bullets.
The Mate gave a sudden yell of pain, and in the same breath almost shouted:
“Look out for the gun, Sir! They’re going to shoot again!”
“Looks a bit that way, Mister,” I said. “Suppose we vacate this highly exalted eminence.”
And with that we both made one jump to the deck and behind my chart-house.
As we did so the whole starboard side off the bridge flew up in a red volcano of fire and smoke, with a crash and a smash that nearly stunned the two of us where we stood. For a couple of seconds it rained burning splinter and chunks of wood in twenty different directions. Then I looked at the Mate. “I’ve a notion that’s what the newspapers at home describe as a providential escape,” I said.... You much hurt, Mister?”
“N—no Sir,” he said. “I got a bullet graze, I suppose it was, up on the bridge; but it’s stopped hurting.”
I’d hardly waited for his reply, for I was into the chart-house, through the port door in a moment. I found the atmosphere in there pretty near as concussive as the shell-fire outside. The gun had jammed, in some one of those silly ways that hopper-fed guns will jam, and what the Second Engineer and Gatley between them were saying to it, with the aid of a spanner, was sheer inspiration—though the gun didn’t seem to stop being jammed!
“Good Lord,” I said, after I’d had a glance at the gun, “shove the trip-lever right over, for the Lord’s sake, and get her going. I thought you understood guns, Gatley! And you, Mister Engineer, I’m surprised you couldn’t tumble to a simple thing like that!”
I pushed them, one on each side of the gun, out of my way, grabbed the trip-lever (for lifting the net cartridge from the hopper), and shoved it hard over (Gatley had only pushed it two-thirds over), and then with a good swing forward I jumped the next cartridge into place, shoved the lever back again, and the gun stood ready to fire. And in that moment—CRASH! the whole chart-house rocked, and the forrard starboard top corner went up in a fountain of splintered steel, woodwork, glass, and part of my glass-rack.
Then I got busy. I shouldered the shoulder-pad of the gun, forced her muzzle well down, and pulled the firing lever.
BANG! went the gun—a stunning, deafening bang, and great Scott, how I yelled with delight!—the long gun on the submarine upended right on its stern, looking a very drunken sort of cannon indeed, squatting on the middle of a twisted-looking, automatic, disappearing pedestal, that I guessed couldn’t disappear in a hurry any more, for my shell had gone slap bang crash into the middle of the works.
I wrenched the trip-lever right over again, and went through the loading movements, which took about two seconds a cartridge. As I did so I wigged the tremend
ous silence in the place, and glanced over my shoulder to see what was wrong. The Second Engineer and the First Mate were trying to stop poor old Gatley bleeding, but I saw in a moment it was no use. But, Lord! how mad it made me.
I jammed the lever well over, depressed the gun a little more, and brought the muzzle round on to the forrard conning-tower. Then I pulled, and BANG!...CRASH! The shell hit the conning-tower, smack, and burst; but when the smoke blew away the conning-tower was still there, though with a deuce of a great skew-whift dint in it. I guess that conning-tower must have been built of three or four-inch steel. I’d heard something about these super-submarines being armoured, but I’d not thought of it particularly. And now I got suddenly anxious, as you can think.
I wrenched the trip-lever backwards and forwards smartly, and sung out to the second Mate to leave poor old Gatley to the Second Engineer, and feed more cartridges into the hopper, and likewise to stand by to keep on feeding ’em in. You see she carried three cartridges at a time in the hopper, and I meant to keep emptying it, if I could.
Bang! I tried a shell slam down onto the fore whale-back of the submarine; but she must have been armoured all her length above water, for the shell only gouged a bright scoop in the metal and glanced off into the sea, just as it burst.
“Darn it all!” I said, and tried two more farther aft. I knocked the bridge-deck between the conning-towers all to pieces, and about six men that were on it went to sea in penny numbers. She was a good little gun, right enough, and if she’d only had the punch I’d have felt happy.
But I wasn’t. I was darned anxious. The men were dodging all over the whalebacks of the submarine—racing towards the after conning-tower as I thought. They’d slammed down the heavy hatch-covers of the boat-hatch, and I tried a shell at the place, to see if I could get through there, but they were too solid.
The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea Page 55
