For answer, the captain of the _Caratana_ put port and starboard engines full ahead, and, whilst men were running to their stations on the warship, the _Caratana_ slipped into the fog-belt.
In an instant, the _Maria Braganza_ was blotted from view.
The liner captain put his helm over to starboard, and it was well that he did so, for, with a reverberating crash, the warship opened fire in the direction in which he had disappeared. Shell after shell came flying through the thick mist, and the thud of their impact as they struck the water came to the ears of the affrighted passengers.
The sound of spasmodic firing grew fainter and fainter every minute as the great steamer went threshing through the swirling fog, until it ceased altogether.
Although no harm had befallen the liner, the news of the attack produced a profound sensation. Its effect was to paralyse the business of ocean travel. The "Mad Warship" terrorised the seas.
It was on the day the report of this new outrage reached England that T. B. Smith located Poltavo.
There languished in a prosaic prison cell at Brixton Gaol a Monsieur Torquet, who was admittedly a victim of police persecution. That much T. B. himself was prepared to admit.
Monsieur Torquet was suspected not of a crime against any particular section of society, but indeed of being accessory to a crime against humanity; and T. B. was prepared to run a tilt at the very Habeas Corpus Act rather than release his grip upon the stranger with the straggling beard who had so heavily insured the _Taglan Castle_ before she started out on her adventurous voyage.
This Monsieur Torquet, brooding in the loneliness of his cell at Brixton, had very nearly reached the limits of his patience; the silence and the indifference had crushed what little spirit there was in him.
For two months he had lain without trial, in a cell which had a table on which were pen, paper, and ink. He had not in all that time touched the one or the other, but on the day that the Atlantic liner came across the _Maria Braganza_ he sat at the table and wrote a brief note to the governor of the prison. Within an hour T. B. Smith was ushered into the cell, and remained with the man for some time. Then he came out, and sent for a shorthand clerk, and together they returned.