Swinging along she went, rolling one rail down and then the other, but not making it hard to stand almost anywhere around deck, except that when you went aft there was a drive of air that lifted you maybe a little faster than you started out to go. Swinging along she went, a long, easy swing, carrying a long white swash to either side of her, vibrating a thousand to the minute on her fantail, streaming out a long white and pale-blue wake for as far as we could see, and just clear of her taffrail piling up the finest little hill of clear white boiling water. Twenty-nine, they say, she was making, and still picking up. What! Thirty? And a little more left in her? What d'y' know--some little baby, hah? Another radio came to the bridge: "A shell below our water-line. Settling, but still afloat and still fighting." "Good work. Stick to it," they said on the bridge, and wondered whether it was the skipper or the radio man who was framing the messages. He had the dramatic instinct, whoever he was. Perhaps twenty minutes later came: "Water in our engine-room." And then: "Fire in our forehold, but will not surrender. Look for our boats." And: "They are now shooting at our antennae." Radios to the bridge are not posted up for the crew to gossip over, but there was no keeping that last one under cover. "Shelling their attenay? Well, the mortifying dogs! Whatever you do, don't let 'em get your attenay, old bucket." Our thirty-knot clip was eating up the road. We were getting near the spot. The canvas caps came off the guns, and the gun crews were told to load and stand by. A chief gunner's mate was told to make ready his torpedo-tubes. He was a famous torpedo-man. He would stay up all night with an ailing gyro or hydrostatic piston and not even ask to sleep in next morning for a reward, and he had a record of making nothing but hits at torpedo-practice. But he had been glum all the trip. He had stayed past the legal hour on liberty the last time in, and the shore patrol had come along and scooped him up. A court-martial was coming to him and so he had been glum; but not now. He went around decks smiling, with a little steel thing that looked like a wrist-bag but wasn't. It held the keys to the magazines. Pretty soon he had torpedo-tubes swinging inboard and outboard, and between every pair of tubes a man sitting up in an iron seat that looked like the kind that goes with a McCormick reaper, which all helped the gunner's mate to feel better. He stopped ten seconds to tell the story of the new gun-crew man who was sent up the yard to the storekeeper for a pair of spurs to ride the torpedo-tubes with. There were four guns, one forward, one aft, and two in the waist. They had been slushed down with vaseline to keep the salt-water rust off; now they were swabbing the grease off. Grease on the outside of a gun does not affect the shooting of the inside, but a gun ought naturally to look slick going into action.