"Will they follow us below, Captain?" he asked.
Black did not seem to hear him.
"This will be great news for Guichard," says he, as though that thought ran in his head before others; "I must give him a good account of it when we get through to Paris. There isn't a head like Guichard's in all France, so help me Heaven. Did ye see the way she went down, boys—like a diver, and better? And these swine came here to hunt me out. As true as night, they were after Black and his ship. Well, let 'em take her if they can. The carrion, let 'em put their beaks into me if they have the mind to."
He spat upon the floor as though the fury of it had taken possession of him, body and soul; then, peering into the path of the light, he told us what was in his mind.
"Maybe I could show them a clean pair of heels—maybe not. If I run for it and they hold me, there may be warships out of Portsmouth or Frenchmen out of Brest. My word's for here. And now, God help those that keep under. If you're with me, Doctor, say so and have done with it. I never was one to forbid a man to speak, and I don't begin to-night. Answer plainly, then, shall it be now or to-morrow? You've got a life to lose as well as me. Say what's in your head and I'll listen."
Osbart seemed to hesitate, as well he might have done. This terror of the nether sea sat ill upon him as it sat ill upon me. Sometimes I could have cried aloud for very dread of the prison of steel and all its fearful suggestion. Even Black had need of all his iron nerve.
"Well, man, are you tongue-tied, then—will you have no voice in it?"
Osbart shrugged his shoulders.
"It's in your hands," said he at last; "sink or swim, you are the man to lead us."
"And the lad here—what does he say?"
I knew not how to answer him and yet felt compelled to speak. A fool alone would have uttered a platitude to this crew of desperadoes fighting for their lives in the caverns of the sea.
"In your place," I said at last, "in your place I would fight now. But I should never have been in your place, Captain, and that you know well."
He smiled on me not unkindly, I thought, and then called for a glass of wine all round and gave us a toast.
"To-morrow!" said he; "to those who see to-morrow!" And he drained the glass to the dregs and bade the negro, whom his bell had summoned, to refill it. Then he asked for the engineer whom they called Dingo, and the two conferred together in low tones for many minutes. When they had done and he took up the sea telephone again, there was not a sound in the tower save that of the deep breathing of three men.
"They're about three hundred yards away upon the starboard quarter," says Black at last; and I knew that by "they" he meant the French boats we had come down to seek. Presently, however, he astonished us by adding, quite calmly: "But there are only two of them now"; and upon that he laughed and rang down an order to the engineer.
Immediately afterward the Zero began to creep along the sandbank; she had made some two hundred yards, I suppose, when, all together, we espied one of the French submarines, and knew that she was done for.
No words of mine could tell of my thoughts at this moment or of the emotions which afflicted me. There upon the sand I saw the wrecked submarine lying upon her side with her bows stove in, and I needed no words to tell me that she had collided with one of her fellows and sunk without hope for those she imprisoned. To them the plates of steel were now a ghastly tomb, mocking their cries and bruising the hands which beat upon them. My mind depicted their agony, and I could not but reflect that we ourselves might suffer just such a fate before many minutes were numbered.
To be sure, a sentiment of self-pity seemed out of place under such circumstances, nor could I expect it to be shared by the others. Black himself stood quite unmoved, regarding the wrecked hull with an indifference which might have been expected from such a temperament. Imagination did not help him to realize the sufferings of the doomed men; his thoughts centred upon his own good luck in finding one antagonist removed from his path. I thought him brutal in the hour of triumph; but he had been that from the beginning, and it was not to be supposed that the night had changed him.
"Caught in their own trap, by the Lord," he cried, pressing his face to the port as though his eyes must devour the awful sight. Osbart, in his turn, began to laugh horribly, and the laughter waxed and waned fearfully in the tower as the ravings of a madman whose hands have touched death. When I begged him to forbear, Black turned upon me savagely:
"Aye, let him laugh," he bellowed, "the lid's off the hell can and the water's in. Would you lie where they lie? Is he to whimper like a woman because the skunks don't know black from white? The sea rot their bones. I wouldn't lift a finger to save one of them if this were the Day of Judgment."
He flung my arm aside with a wild oath and again gave the signal, "Half -speed ahead." Whatever was my pity for the poor fellows in the cabins of the Plongeur, it gave place immediately to a new interest when I beheld the other submarines lying, perhaps, a hundred yards from us and prepared, I did not doubt, for instant attack. So quickly did they act that a loud cry from Black bore witness to the cleverness of it. I saw a dark shape in the water, and knew that it was a torpedo. A ripple of foam ran in its wake; the eyes of it were like those of a fish; the sea telephone carried to my ears the drone of its motor as it headed straight for the Zero. Then an agony of dread fell upon me. I did not dare to look again, but waited with my eyes shut for the roar of the explosion and the instant of death.
Some one has said that it is necessary to live through such instants as these to know the meaning of life. If that be so, the cup of my philosophy has been filled to overflowing since destiny first sent me to Ice Haven. Time and again have I stood upon the brink of the dark valley to be snatched therefrom by the genius and the courage of the great pirate. And as it had been when the Nameless Ship dominated the ocean, so now. The blow, which should have shivered the Zero, never fell. A touch upon her helm, a lightning-like deviation from her course, and the work was done. The torpedo, they told me, touched the very rim of our periscope. A foot nearer and it would have shivered us to atoms, there in the depths of the English Channel where the coastwise lights had been our beacon.
A laugh from Black told me the truth, and I opened my eyes to see that we had run right between the attacking submarines, and that they now lay exactly abreast of us, so that we could mark the faces of the men in their conning-towers and study the expressions of those who knew that they were warring with us for very life. Of these my memories are vivid. Often in my sleep I see the wild eyes which then encountered my own; the pale faces of the French seamen, and especially the face of a young lad who stood at the lieutenant's side and trembled with an apprehension of death. Poor boy, I learned afterward that his name was Maurice Dalerny, and that he had left a sweetheart behind him at Calais; but I think he knew that he would never see the sun again, and he was but seventeen years old. The others were grown men, but the horrors of the fight were heavy upon them, and a visionary might have said that they were the ghosts of dead seamen risen suddenly from the deep.
All this, I would write, was the apparition of an instant; and when it had passed Black stopped our engines, and we lay for a little while inanimate upon the sands. What manœuvre he contemplated—what was in his mind or how he hoped eventually to escape from such a trap, I knew no more than the dead; but I could see that he had become strangely excited and Osbart no less. At last, without any warning whatever, he took the speaking-tube in his hands and roared an order which set the very lamps reverberating.
"Stand by to fire the mines!"
Some one answered, "Aye, aye, sir"; and the ship began to move. Our projectors were now throwing great beams of light straight upward to the surface of the sea, and so brilliant were they that all the water might have been aflame. We moved on a cable length, perhaps, and then once more we eased. I saw Black standing as a figure of bronze by the signal bell and realized that we were going about. For an instant silence befell, and then as a rocket fired from a gun we began to tower, upward and upward, while from below there came the boom of a mighty cataclysm which flung