"I don't remember that either she or us switched on recognition lights, but the Hun opened with ev'rything that would bear just before we slammed together. It must have been by the gun-flashes that I saw she had three funnels, wi' what looked like some kind o' marks painted on 'em in red. I saw our second funnel give a jump and crumple up as a proj hit it, an' then a spurt o' flame--from a big gun fired almost point-blank--looked to shoot right on to the bridge. I thought that it must have killed ev'ry man there an' carried away all the steering gear. But no. "The old _Firebrand_ wi' helm hard-a-port, went swingin' right on thro' the point or two more that saved her life. I could feel by the way she jumped an' gathered herself that last second that the ol' girl was still under control. Then we struck wi' a horrible grind an' crash, an' I went sprawlin' flat. "If the Hun had hit us half a wink sooner, or if we had turned half a point less, we'd have been swallowed alive and split up in small hunks. As it was, we didn't have a lot the worst o' it, an' p'raps we more than broke even. It was like a mastiff an' terrier runnin' into each other in the dark, an' the terrier only gettin' run over an' the mastiff gettin' a piece bit clean out o' his neck. It was our port bows that come together, an' for only a sort o' glancin' blow. But it was the stem o' the _Firebran'_ that was turned in sharpest, an' it was her that was hittin' up--by a good ten knots--the most speed. She was left in a terribl' mess, but most o' the damage was from her rammin' the Hun, not from the Hun rammin' her. While as for what she did to the Hun, the best proof o' it was the more'n twenty feet of her side-platin'--an upper strake, wi' scuttl' holes in it an' pieces o' gutterway deck hangin' to it--that we found in the wreck of our fo'c'sl'. If the hole that hunk of steel left behind it didn't put that Hun out o' bus'ness as a fightin' unit till she got back to port an' had a refit, I'll eat it." I wasn't quite clear in my mind whether Melton meant to imply that he would eat the hole in the Hun cruiser or the hunk of steel that came out of it, but there _was_ no room for doubt that the violent crunch with which he emphasised the assertion had put a period to the life of his "All-Day Sucker," which was never intended to be treated like chewing toffy. Dipping into the grab-bag of my "lammy" coat pocket for something with which to replace it, therefore, I brought up a stick of chewing gum, and he resumed his story in an atmosphere sweet with the ineffable odour of spearmint and escaping steam.