SEA HOUNDS CHAPTER I THE MEN WHO CHANGED SHIPS Between the lighter-load of burning beeves that came bumping down along their line at noon, a salvo of bombs slapped across them at one o'clock from a raiding Bulgar air squadron, a violent Levantine squall which all but broke them loose from their moorings at sundown, and a signal to raise steam for full speed with all dispatch at midnight, it had been a rather exciting twelve hours for the destroyers of the First Division of the ----th Flotilla, and now, when at dawn the expected order to proceed to sea was received, it began to look as though there might be still further excitement in pickle down beyond the horizontal blur where the receding wall of the paling purple night-mist was uncovering the Gulf's hard, flat floor of polished indigo. "It's probably the same old thing," said the captain of the _Spark_, repressing a yawn after he had given the quartermaster his course to enter the labyrinthine passage where puffing trawlers were towing back the gates of the buoyed barrages, "a U-boat or two making a bluff at attacking a convoy. They've been sinking a good deal more than we can afford to lose; last week they got an oiler and another ship with the whole summer's supply of mosquito-netting aboard--but that was off the south peninsula of Greece or up Malta way. Here they haven't more than 'demonstrated' about the mouth of the Gulf for two or three months. They know jolly well that if they once come inside, no matter if they do sink a ship or two, that it's a hundred to one--between sea-planes, 'blimps,' P.B.s, and destroyers--against their ever getting out again. There's just a chance that they may try it this time, though, for they must know how terribly short the whole Salonika force is of petrol, and what a real mess things will be left in if they can pot even one of the two or three oilers in this convoy. You'll see a merry chase with a kill at the end of it if they do, I can promise you, for the convoy is beyond the neck of the bag even now, and if a single Fritz has come in after them, the string will be pulled and the rest of the game will be played out here in the 'bull-ring.'"