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The cotton-bales on the guards had been set on fire by a bursting shell; the tiller-rope shot away, rendering it impossible to steer the boat; the boilers penetrated, and the engine-room filled with hot steam, which now began to rise and envelop the men on the boiler-deck.
But the water gained on them. The ship sunk lower and lower in the black ocean, until a glance over the side could tell all too plainly that she was going to her fate. Now the water begins to ooze through the cracks in the engine-room floor, and break in gentle ripples about the feet of the firemen.
Then he made up a neat bundle of the various odds and ends that he had gathered from the engines little things like nuts and valve-spindles, all carefully tallowed and retired with them under the floor of the engine-room, where he sighed, being fat, as he passed from manhole to manhole of the double bottom, and in a fairly dry submarine compartment hid them.
I noticed, too, that several figures appeared to be beating the intervening fields. Stumm's cordon had got busy at last, and I thanked my stars that not one of the villagers had seen me. I had not got away much too soon, for in another half-hour he would have had me. The Return of the Straggler Before I turned in that evening I had done some good hours' work in the engine-room.
Droop was making desperate efforts to climb along the floor and reach the engine-room, but, although by dint of gigantic struggles he managed to make his way a few feet, he was then obliged to pause for breath, whereupon he slid gently and ignominiously back to his nook under the table. Here he found himself in contact with a corked bottle. He looked at it and felt comforted.
We got into the stoke-hole and collared the engine-room while the Russians were at dinner. Then, while I covered the sailors forward with the machine-gun on the bridge, Sievers took the gold-laced crowd aft with a rush. The rest is not worth telling, for you know it.
They could only stand there and wait for total annihilation, which they expected every moment. The roaring grew louder. It was like the howling of a mighty mind. The projectile seemed to tremble. Then there came a brilliant light, rivaling even that of the sun, in the rays of which they constantly were. The light streamed in through the plate-glass ports in the engine-room.
Her commander snaps out a number of orders. Provisions are to be taken in "up to the neck," fresh water is to be put aboard, and engine-room supplies to be supplemented. A mere plank is the gangway to the little vessel. As the commander, followed by his officers, comes aboard, a sailor hands to each a ball of cotton-waste, the sign and symbol of a submarine officer, which never leaves his hand.
"I have certainly been very grateful to you and to them for all they did for me," replied Christy with a sad expression on his handsome face as the commander recalled the three shipmates of both of them who slept in heroes' graves. "Perhaps the brilliant genius of our engine-room did quite as much for you as any other person, though not many years your senior."
Steaming up the lake at very low water, and being somewhat foggy, our boat stuck on the mud. Worst of all, it was ebb tide, and here we had to wait for the return of the in flowing tide. We schoolboys gathered together in the engine-room and did our home-lessons. In a few hours we floated and very soon reached the landing place, and we arrived at home about midnight.
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