"We picked her up promptly as reckoned, but, while she was still hull down on the horizon, her skipper began to signal frantically, '_I am being chased by the "Karlsruhe"!_' Here was luck indeed. I ordered 'Action Stations' to be sounded, and the course of the ship to be altered toward the point where I figured the smoke of the pursuing pirate would begin to smudge the sky-line as she came swooping down upon her prey. Sighting nothing after holding on this course for a while, I came to the conclusion that the raider must be hidden by the impenetrable smoke-pall with which the flying beef-ship had masked a wide arc of the western horizon, and headed up in that direction, begging the fugitive in the meantime to give me the bearing of her pursuer as accurately as possible. "Her only reply to this, however, was to belch out 'smoke-screen' faster than ever and continue rending the empyrean ether with renewed '_I am being chased by the "Karlsruhe"!_' In vain I assured her that we were the H.M.S. _Cornwall_, and would take the greatest delight in seeing that the chase was put an end to, if she would only tell us from which direction the _Karlsruhe_ was coming, and cease to throw out a bituminous blanket for the enemy to hide behind. Blacker and blacker rolled the smoke, heavier and heavier piled the screen to leeward, and still more frantically shrilled the appeals for help. At the end of my patience at actions which it now began to dawn upon me looked more than a little suspicious, I headed the _Cornwall_ straight after the runaway and soon reduced the interval separating us sufficiently to reach her with 'Visual.' She brought up sharp at my 'Stop instantly!' and a quarter of an hour later my boarding party was clambering over her side. "'Where's the _Karlsruhe_?' I shouted impatiently to the Boarding Officer as his boat came back alongside again. I knew something of the accuracy of German long range naval gunnery, and was far from being easy in mind regarding the kind of surprise packet that might at any moment be wafted out of that slowly thinning smoke-blur to leeward. "'There,' he replied with a comprehensive sweep of the arm in quite the opposite direction from the one I had been expecting the enemy. 'Right there, Sir.' That old lunatic of a skipper thought the _Cornwall_ was the _Karlsruhe_!" "Did you get your frozen beef?" I asked. The Captain smiled the pleased smile of one who recalls something that has given him great satisfaction. "I think that afternoon marked the beginning of the 'Food Economy' campaign in the Navy," he replied. "If the Admiralty had been able to continue buying frozen beef at the rate that crestfallen but highly relieved skipper--quite of his own free will--charged for the lot we loaded up after he had found it was not to be his fate to be sunk by the _Karlsruhe_,--well, the Government could have probably built a new battleship or two and never missed the money out of the saving."