Quiet-spoken, he found that the fact of being in command was not without its disadvantages. At first he possessed hardly sufficient self-confidence to give an order loudly and peremptorily. But by degrees the force of authority asserted itself, and when necessary he could bellow like a bull and make himself heard in a gale of wind. He was daring, but at the same time cautious. He could make up his mind in an instant, and rarely was his judgment at fault, while his courageous bearing in many a tight corner had won the admiration and confidence of his crew. Judging by their previous occupations, the crew of M.L. 1071 were a "scratch lot." There were two clerks, a butcher, a chauffeur, an insurance agent, a London County Council schoolmaster, an hotel porter, a theological student and a poacher, although the latter was camouflaged under the designation of farm labourer. And these men, volunteers all, had been banded together under the White Ensign to do their level best to make things mighty unpleasant for Fritz by means of a quick-firer and an assortment of particularly obnoxious depth-charges. True, up to the present, opportunities for direct action had been denied them, but nevertheless it was not for want of trying. It was certainly a beast of a night. The moon had risen, but her light hardly penetrated the white eddying wreaths of vapour. Viewed from the deck of M.L. 1071, the hull of her parent ship appeared to terminate twenty yards away, while her steel masts and fighting-tops, grotesquely distorted by the erratic mists, were visible at one moment like pillars of silver, while at another they appeared to be cut off at less than fifteen feet above the deck. Already three of the six vessels detailed for the forty-eight hours' patrol had been swallowed up in the mist, as with lights screened they groped their way blindly towards the invisible mouth of the harbour and the seemingly boundless expanse of sea and fog beyond. With the air reverberating with the roar of the exhausts and the deck quivering under the pulsations of the throttled motors, Wakefield and Meredith made their way to the diminutive wheel-house, where the coxwain (ex-theological student) was standing by the steering-wheel and peering with a studied professional manner into the dimly illuminated compass-bowl. "All ready?" inquired the skipper in stentorian tones. "Let go for'ard!... Let go aft!" The engine-room telegraph bells clanged as Wakefield thrust the starboard indicator to easy ahead and the port one to half-speed astern. Literally spinning round on her heel, M.L. 1071 edged away from the _Hesperus_, the towering hull of which was quickly swallowed up in the mist. "Good enough, Sub!" exclaimed Wakefield. "We're right in the wake of the next ahead. Now carry on. It's my watch below. Give me a shout if anything's doing, and get them to call me at four bells."