It was about an hour or two later that the wireless winged word that seemed at last to herald the real thing. It was the S.O.S. of a steamer, and conveyed merely the information that she had just been torpedoed, with her latitude and longitude. The position given was only thirty or forty miles to the northward, and though the name in the message--it was _Namoura_ or something similar--could not be found on any of our shipping lists, the _Zop_, as senior ship, promptly ordered course altered and full speed made in the hope of arriving on the scene in time to be of some use. With every minute likely to be of crucial importance, it was not an occasion to waste time by waiting or asking for orders. A swift exchange of signals between ships, a hurried order or two down a voice-pipe, an advancing of the handle of the engine-room telegraph, a throwing over of the wheel, and we had spun in the welter of our tossing wake and were off on a mission that might prove one of either mercy or destruction, or, quite conceivably, both. The formation in which we had been cruising when the signal was received gave the _Zip_ something like a mile lead at the get-away, and this--though one of the others was a newer and slightly faster ship--she held gallantly to the end of the race. By a lucky chance, though there was a snoring wind and a lumpy sea running, the course brought both abaft the beam and permitted us to run nearly "all out" without imposing a serious strain on the ship. The difference between running before and bucking into seas of this kind I was to learn in a day or two. For the moment, conditions were all that could be asked to favour our getting with all dispatch into whatever game there was to be played. Many a so-called express train has travelled slower than any one of those three destroyers was ploughing its way through solid green water. For a few seconds after "Full speed!" had been rung down to their engine-rooms, swift-spinning smoke rings had shot up from their funnels and gone reeling off down to leeward; then, with perfect synchronisation of draught and oil, the duskiness above the mouths of the stumpy stacks had cleared, and only the mirage on the horizon astern betrayed the up-spouting jets of hot gases. Only the vibrant throb of the speeding engines--so pervading that it seemed to pulse like heart-beats through the very steel itself--gave hint of the mightiness of the effort that speed was costing. With that throb stilled--and the mounting wake quenched--the progress of that thousand tons or so of steam-driven steel would have seemed scarcely less effortless than that of an aeroplane.