Men were below that spot of sea, Ruth knew--German men, fifty or eighty or a hundred of them, perhaps. They were young men, mostly, not unlike--in their physical appearance, at least--German-born boys whom she had known at home in Onarga or in Chicago. Some of that crew might, conceivably, even be cousins of those boys. They had mothers and sisters in homes at Hamburg or Dresden or Munich or perhaps in that delightful toy town of Nuremberg, which she knew and had loved from pictures and stories; or some of them came, perhaps, from the Black Forest--from those quaint, lovely homely woodland cottages which Howard Pyle and Grimm had taught her to love when she was a child. They were helpless down there below the sea at this moment, perhaps, with the seams of their boat opened by that tremendous shock which had battered even the _Ribot_ so far away; water might be coming in upon them, suffocating them, drowning them there like rats in a trap. The vision flowed before Ruth’s eyes for an instant with horror; then she saw them, not choking and fighting each other for escape which none could find, but crouching safe and smiling in their boat, stealing away swiftly and undamaged to wait chance to rise again to try another torpedo at the _Starke_ or to surprise with gunfire, at the next dawn, another vessel like the _Ribot_ and murder more people in their beds and fill the space below decks with the dead and the agonized dying. “Get ’em!” Gerry Hull, close beside her, was praying. “Oh, get ’em now! Get ’em!” No reaction to weakness had come to him; years ago, he had passed beyond that; and Ruth, at once, had recovered. “Get ’em!” Aloud, without being conscious of it, she echoed his ejaculation; and astern of the _Starke_, as the few minutes before, another great geyser of seawater arose; another titanic blow, disseminating through the water, beat upon the _Ribot_. The _Starke_ was turning about short, again; but when she rushed back over her wake, this time she dropped no other depth charge; she slowed a little instead, and circled while she examined carefully the surface of the sea. Then suddenly she straightened her course away to the south; she buried her bow in a wave; with the rush of her propellers, foam churned at her stern; she was at full speed after the U-boat which she first had engaged and which, during this interlude, had run quite out of sight to the south or had sunk or submerged. While she pursued, her radio was reporting to the _Ribot_; and the _Ribot’s_ rasped in return.