From the stoke-hold, near at hand, from which now emerged bigger, whiter clouds of steam and smoke, came the clank of spades upon the steel decks, and the scrape as fuel was shovelled up and thrown into the furnaces. There, in what appeared to be an inferno of smoke and flashing beams of light as furnace doors were opened, amidst fiercest heat and sweat and incessant movement, stood two of the recently escaped British sailors, nonchalant, erect, one hand gripping the muzzle of a rifle and the other akimbo, resting upon their hips. They, too, glanced now here, now there, noting every movement of every man under their charge, but never moved. The glance alone was sufficient.
"They're keepin' them at work as if they was willin' slaves," Jack roared, mopping the perspiration from his streaming forehead, "and you'd hardly believe me, sir, but when I comes up on deck--and glad to get there too, for it's hot down below--I finds our deck hands a-fallin' in and makin' all ready to repel boarders. It looks like the good old days, and if only the Germans do get up, why, repel boarders it will be!"
Bill took a glance around him; not that he had not done so on many an occasion, and had seen all that was going on, but his chief attention was now engaged with the pursuing trawler and with the torpedo-boat destroyers, and with conjecturing where the next shell would fall and what chance he and his men stood of escape from the double danger behind.
"I'm beginning to think," he had just told Larry, "that the German destroyer will soon have her attention fully occupied by the other one--that is, supposing she's British; so if we can escape the shells she's firing at us now we shall have merely the trawler to deal with. She's drawing nearer, I'm sure. Perhaps her engines are bigger and stronger than those in this vessel; in any case we shall soon see. I don't fear her nearly as much as I do the destroyer."
Larry, from the view Bill and Jack obtained of him, cared very little as to what might happen. With his hat tilted forward in the most approved manner, sucking at his cigar again, he peered in the most nonchalant manner over the rail at the pursuing trawler, and hardly lifted his eyes as her gun spoke and repeated the shot--hardly even deigned to turn his head to watch where the missiles went, though when one sailed close over the bridge he cocked his eye overhead, gave a shrug, and whistled.