Then once more came the roar and the crash, followed by its submarine echoes. Once more the land-guns raved, firing blind.
The enemy was counter-mining. Instead of sweeping, his vessels were dropping mines of their own in the fields, and then, backing off to avoid the fire from the batteries if they could, they exploded them by electric contact, to blow up the American mines with the shock.
Not all the mine-sweepers escaped mines or guns. But there were vessels to spare, and lives to spare. All night the counter-mining went on, and all night the American guns fired into the vapor and the darkness.
The sun arose invisibly. But it climbed, and when it had lifted all its disk above the rim of sea, it showed through the mist as a pale illumination. It was “burning off” the fog.
“It will be clear enough in an hour,” said the executive officer of a battleship under Block Island. The vessel’s wireless began to speak.
On one of the mother-ships men brought out and assembled an armored biplane. Its two fliers stowed range-finding apparatus, aerial telegraph, aneroids and charts in it. There were signal flags and light, brightly silvered balls. Men brought receptacles that contained bombs and adjusted them carefully in place. The fliers waited, watching the fog.
It lessened. It tore away in rifts. All around, the ships became visible.
Seven battle-ships swung around and put on speed and rushed in echelon toward the coast. They steered straight for the mouth of Narragansett Bay, turned just outside of the zone of fire of its defenses, slowed down and steamed across the mouth.
The bi-plane’s engine burst into life. The machine lifted and followed them. It flew high over them and into the bay, climbing.
“They’re over it!” said an officer on a ship, looking at the machine through his glasses.
Far inside of the bay, so high in air that it was little more than a shining speck, the aeroplane was describing a series of regular, equal circles. All at once, as if it had been painted in the air with a mammoth brush, a jet-black descending streak stood out against the sky, and lengthened steadily toward the earth.
The azimuth and other range-finding instruments at both ends of the battle-ships caught