“The _Starke_ saw them!” Ruth cried, as the guns on the destroyer, which had been firing at the fleeing U-boat to the south, tore up the sea where the _Ribot’s_ shells were splashing. “The torpedo’s started by this time,” Gerry Hull said. “Two of ’em, probably, if the Huns had two left.” Others about Ruth on the deck of the _Ribot_ realized that; and the commander of the _Starke_ recognized it too. Ruth saw the leaping form of the destroyer veer suddenly and point straight at the spot in the sea where the U-boat had thrust up its periscope. This presented the narrow beam of the destroyer, instead of its length, for the torpedo’s target; but still Ruth held breath as on the _Starke_ came. Gerry Hull had thrust his wrist from his sleeve and, as they stood waiting, he glanced down again and again to his watch. “Passing--past!” he muttered to himself while he counted the time. “The torpedoes have missed,” he announced positively to Ruth at last. The commander of the _Starke_ evidently thought so too; for the length of his boat began to show again. His guns had ceased firing; and the _Ribot’s_ rifles also were silent. The destroyer, veering still farther to the right, was dashing now almost at right angles to its former course. “They’re going to cross the course of the Hun,” Gerry Hull explained this also to Ruth, “and give ’em an ‘ashcan,’ I suppose--a depth charge, you know,” he added. “I know,” Ruth said. She had read, at least, of the tremendous bombs, filled with the new explosive “T. N. T.,” which the U-boat hunters carried and which they dropped with fuse fixed to burst far below the surface. One of these bombs, in size and shape near enough to “ashcans” to win the nickname, was powerful enough--she knew--to wreck an undersea craft if the charge burst close by. The _Starke_ was still leaping on with its length showing to the _Ribot_ when two hundred yards or more astern the destroyer, a great geyser of water leaped into the air fifty--a hundred feet; and while the column of water still seemed to mushroom up and up, a tremendous shock battered the _Ribot_. Someone shouted out in French while another called in English, “Depth charge dropped from the destroyer!” “There was one ‘ashcan,’” Gerry Hull murmured. “Now for another!” For the _Starke_, as soon as the charge had detonated, had put her helm about and was circling back with marvelous swiftness to cross again the spot in the sea where she had dropped the great bomb.