Simultaneously, above the engine-room stair a bell jangled; round swung the pointer to “_Full Ahead_”; and ere the decks were cleared of their bustle the _Kaiser_, like a back-kicking hen, scratched up under her poop a spreading pool of spume, which tossed spasmodic spray-showers and spoutings: and she stirred, stretched like a street, churned the sea, and, wheeling to reveal her receding stern, was away. By which time Hogarth was standing at a cubical cabin of steel on the roof, with him Loveday and Quilter-Beckett, his brow puckered with wrinkles, the sun troubling his eyes. “I suppose the _chef_ is warned?”--he threw away his cigar. “Oh, yes, my Lord King”, Quilter-Beckett answered. And Loveday: “She sweats like a thoroughbred”--haggard, but assuming calm: “few things could be more profusely expeditious”. “Ah, make phrases, John,” murmured Hogarth.... “Well, but hadn't you better be getting out the boats?” Upon which Quilter-Beckett stepped into the little erection, touched a button, and in a minute the water round the southern side was swarming with twenty-three boats whose blue-jackets began to row toward the _Kaiser_. And presently, “It's no use waiting”, said Hogarth, looking in upon Quilter-Beckett: “I should mine and shell her at the same moment, if I were you; tell them to get it in well amidships”. Now a few seconds, full of expectation, passed, the _Kaiser Wilhelm_ already two miles away: till suddenly space opened its throat in a gulf to bay gruff and hollow like hell-gate dogs; and, almost at the same moment, close by the _Kaiser_ a column of water hopped with one humph of venom two hundred feet on high: when this dropped back broad-showering with it came showering a rain of wreckage; and instantly a shriek of lamentation floated over the sea, mixed with another shriek of steam. For the moment the ship, enveloped in vapours, could not be seen; but in two minutes glimpses of her hull appeared, shewing the bluff bulge of her starboard bottom: for she leaned steeply to port with a forward crank, her two starboard screws, now free, spinning asleep like humming-tops. A six-inch shell, beautifully aimed, had shattered her engines, killing two stokers, and a torpedo-mine had knocked a hole nine feet across in her port beam. But as the _Boodah's_ boats, meanwhile, had been racing toward her, and as her own port boats were quickly out, all were got off; in fact, she floated so long, that her ship's papers with £270,000 in specie, and a few hundred-weight of mailbags were saved, and even after the boats reached the _Boodah_ she still stretched there motionless, until, with a sudden flurry, she determined to plunge.