"_There's_ my answer, Fritz," he said, and before the words were out of his mouth the foremost gun opened fire. "You're dev'lish good at raiding merchant convoys--let's see how you take a hiding." The acrid cordite smoke, as his guns gave reply to the German challenge, caught him in the throat, and his words ended in a cough. The German Destroyers turned for home, held their course for eight bitter minutes, steaming hell-for-leather and husbanding their ammunition. Their instructions were peculiar, inasmuch as they were ordered to return at all costs to their base. In destroyer warfare the nation that holds command of the seas can afford to omit this bitter clause from its light-craft's sailing orders; but an Admiralty that knows it can send nothing to the succour of its disabled adventurers perforce plays for safety. The German flotilla leader, bending over his chart and stop-watch, deluged with spray from falling projectiles, made a rapid mental calculation and realised that this was no tip-and-run business. He had played that game twice and brought it off, and played it once too often. In golfing parlance, of which he was entirely ignorant, he was stymied. He laid a smoke-screen, and turned under cover of it, avoided a long-distance torpedo by six feet, and applied himself to the voice-pipe connecting him with the engine-room. What he said to the blond perspiring engineer at the other end does not concern this story, because a "browning" salvo at four miles' range struck his quivering fugitive command amidships, and beat her into a flaming, smoking welter of flying fragments and spouting foam. His opponent saw things appearing above the smear of that hasty smoke-screen, things that leaped into view against the grey sky and descended again into invisibility. He lowered his glasses, glanced grinning at his First Lieutenant, and gave another order to the Quartermaster at the wheel. But the Quartermaster was seized with a sudden preoccupation. He was leaning back against a stanchion with the broken spokes of the wheel still in his hands, looking with stupefied amazement at the pulsating jet squirting from his thigh. "Hand steering-gear!" bawled the Commander, striving to dominate the din of the action with a mechanical shout. He jumped the body of the Yeoman of Signals, sprawled bloodily across the head of the ladder, and stumbled blindly down the iron rungs. "Give 'em hell, Number One!" he shouted, and caught a glimpse of his Second-in-Command's head and shoulders above the rent and tattered splinter-mats. "The blighters have got our range," he muttered, and as he reached the upper deck he saw another torpedo hurtle from the tube and vanish in a cloud of spray. "Keep it going, boys!" he shouted, as he passed the midship gun. "Give it to 'em hot and strong!"