"That," continued Prince, beginning to prod anew his neglected sprayers, "just about concluded our day's work. As there was no longer any prospect of getting in mouldie-range of any of the big Huns, and as none of the little Huns were in sight to fight with gun-fire, it must have occurred to the captain that it was time he was rejoining the flotilla. There was only some dark blurs on the north'ard skyline to steer for at first, and the Huns did all they knew to keep us from getting there, too. For a while we were doing nothing but playing 'hide-and-seek' among the salvoes they tried to stop us with, and I have heard since that the way the captain used his helm to avoid being hit at this stage of the show was rated as about the cleverest work of the kind in the whole battle. "It was the Fifth B.S.--the _Queen Elizabeth_ class--that we caught up to first, and a grand sight it was, the four of them standing up and giving battle to about the whole of the High Sea Fleet. They were taking a heavy pounding without turning a hair, so far as a man could see, and even when the _Warspite_ had her steering gear knocked out and went steaming in circles it didn't seem to upset the other three very much. We sighted our own Battle Fleet about six, and rejoined the flotilla in good time to be back with the battle cruisers when Beatty took them round the head of the Hun line and only failed to cut off their retreat through night coming on. "Compared with what the next six or eight hours held for some of our destroyers--or even with what we had just been through ourselves--the night for us was fairly quiet. We were in action once or twice, and I saw several ships--mostly enemy, but one or two of our own--go up in flame and smoke before I went on watch down here at midnight. But through it all the devil's own luck which had been with us from the first held good. Although we were through the very hottest of the day action, and not the least of the night, the old _Nairobi_ did not receive one direct hit from an enemy shell. She accounted for at least two Hun ships, saw the other three destroyers of her division sunk or put out of action, and returned to base with almost empty oil tanks and perhaps the largest mileage to her credit of any craft in the Jutland battle--all without a serious casualty or more than a few scratches to her paint. On top of it all, on the way back to harbour, by the queerest fluke you ever heard of, she rammed and exploded the air-chamber of a mouldie that had been fired by a Hun U-boat at the destroyer next in line ahead of her. As the Yanks say, 'Can you beat it?'" CHAPTER IV HUNTING