The submarine had risen and stood away to southward. So intent had the occupants of the lifeboat been to discover some sign of their companions that the discovery of themselves by the submarine flash came with a shock of surprise. In the light of that pale ray, which had picked them out of the darkness, they saw in that first moment no more than one another's faces—a memory to last them all their days.

"They're hailing us," the captain said with bitter mouth.

"Who is hailing us?" The idea of rescue was still in the forefront of his mind.

"Submarine."

How the captain knew, Newcomb had no idea. But certainly the insignificant, low-pitched shadow—obscure mother of the light-ray ... she was moving! And she was moving in the direction of the Leyden's grave.

A voice came from her at last, uttering not the German they thought to hear, but words yet more unfamiliar.

"He says," interrupted the Dutch captain, "we're to come 'longside."

"Shall we?" The chief engineer still could conceive orders as coming only from the autocrat of the ship at the bottom of the sea.

"No choice." The captain's voice sank lower on an oath. He leaned forward, and conferred with the men at the bow. Newcomb had noticed that the captain still wore the coat of the captain of the watch, and he saw now that when the grizzled head that had been bent in conference with the engineer, was lifted, it wore a landsman's cap—a checked deerstalker.

Clearly the engineer had been placed in command of this little expedition over the intervening blackness to learn their fate—a blackness that seemed to open to the long ray of the flash-light. To the unnautical mind, the shortened ray seemed to draw the lifeboat in and in, till the conning-tower stood clear to the straining eye; in and in, till to the right of the main origin of light dim figures took shape; in and in, till just before the oarsmen had brought the lifeboat alongside the shelving body, topped with its low deck, suddenly the light ray was extinguished. Lifeboat and submarine swung an instant in an equal blackness. Out of it a voice, again in those strange accents. No answer till an English tongue spoke from the lifeboat, "We can understand a little German."

And then, just as eyes were beginning to grow accustomed to the dark, which, after all, was darkness only by comparison, the compact figure standing out on the conning-tower against the star-sown sky turned on the light of an electric torch he held in his hand. He trailed the sudden radiance along the lifeboat, raking her fore and aft. The light lingered an instant at the stern. But the question he asked was: "Name of your ship?"

He was told.

"Dutch?"

Holland-American, she was.

"Tonnage?"

"That was given, too."

"Are you the captain?"

"No. Chief Engineer Van Zandt."

An order was issued in German, and the interrogatory went on:

"Where is the captain?"

"Hard to say," some one answered gruffly.

"He's where a British captain can usually be found," said another.

"In these days that 'usually' means at the bottom," retorted the commander of the submarine. "Have you got any papers?"

"Papers?"

"Yes, yes, Dummheit; where are the ship's papers?"

"We'd better ask you," retorted a voice at the stern.

"You'd better keep the tongue civil!" came sharply back, with the first betrayal of flaw in the perfect English.

Two figures coming up on the conning-tower brought with them the diffused light of some open hatchway as they took their stand behind the commander. He showed clearly now, a firm, square-built presence, a beardless round face above the muffler. He said something over his shoulder, and one of the two men just come up, stepped briskly to the commander's side. During those few seconds it seemed mere chance that the torch still lit up the stern of the lifeboat—lit the small, white face with its parted lips and shining eyes, a face so destitute of fear, so charged with sheer burning curiosity, that any sane person might be forgiven for staring hard at what could only be a crass incapacity on a girl's part to comprehend the situation.

"How many boats did you launch?" the brusk voice went on with the catechism.

The engineer decided to say eight.

"That all? Why didn't you launch more?"

"No time."

"No time! That shows you're lying." He turned again and conferred with the little group behind him.

"Ja, ja—auch meine Meinung." He wheeled round. "All right," he called out; "shove off!"

Nobody in the lifeboat moved.

Grant's voice was heard for the first time after the second of stark silence:

"What are you going to do with the people in this boat?"

"Finished with you. Shove off!"

That loosed tongues. The boat was full of angry voices. Grant's alone, steady, quiet, but heard above them all, said:

"It's a mistake, then?—Wait a moment!"—he rose and steadied himself in the gentle swell—"I say!—it's a mistake, then, that we're a hundred miles from land?"

"Not much mistake about that," the voice came back.

"Are we to wait while you overhaul the other boats?"

"Why should you wait?"

"You mean to round the others up and give us a tow?"

"Oh, do I?"

Again the commander repeated that action of his, tilting the torch so as to show up the pale oval with the eager eyes.

Newcomb readily owned afterward that the sharp collision of emotions in those minutes during the interview put out of the question any sober thinking or coÖrdination of impressions. All that came later. But in the flux of feeling he knew even at the time that his peculiar loathing of the man wasn't altogether due to the devilish work he had finished, or fear of what was yet to come. Even in the thick of shifting dreads and hates Newcomb knew that moment by moment, ever since the colloquy began in the background of his torn mind, a consciousness was shaping which told him that this man would have cut the parting shorter but for some special stimulation of his contemptuous interest in the lifeboat. And to what could such stimulation be due but to the spectacle (Newcomb admitted its crowning strangeness) of the way in which one person in the boat was taking what most would count a catastrophe to shake the soul.

Did the fact of the absence of hatred in the face of the only woman in the boat account for the something which Newcomb had little expected to find in a German U-boat captain—that slight tendency to attitudinize in the midst of his grim business, to assume the "gallant commander" air, as no man does in exactly the same way for his fellowmen. This ghastly suggestion of flirtatiousness, following hard as it did on the heels of murder, and making its obscure demand over the very grave of the sunken ship, stirred Newcomb to a pitch of fury hardly sane. And how the thought flashed through him—how was Grant taking this girl's mockery of him, mockery of all her protectors, of decency itself? And behold Grant was "taking it"—this thing done on the floor of ocean—as a man may whose head is among the stars. Poor devil! he didn't even see it, didn't even sense what the commander's insolent use of the torch showed in that circumscribed field of intense light—the girl's eyes still wide and curious.

Instead of natural loathing, of every form of moral condemnation, she was staring at the submarine commander with breathless interest, with an eagerness that might flatter any man alive.

Grant had made his way down the lifeboat, holding to this one's shoulder, steadying himself by that one's arm, his face drawn with anxiety, but for all that a figure of hope, of conciliation.

"I say," he called out, "we haven't got any provisions in this boat, and we're—you know how far we are from land."

"Bad management," commented the German, his eyes slipping past Grant again to the face at the stern.

"Even if it is bad management, you're not going to abandon eighteen fellow-beings in an open boat in mid-Atlantic, not civilians, to die of starvation?"

That didn't seem to deserve an answer.

"Who's in charge of your boat?" was the curt demand.

Grant hesitated.

"I am," answered Van Zandt.

"Well, don't you know how to shove off when you're told to?"

"Stop!" Julian flung up an arm. "It's an impossible barbarity! Look!" He swung round. "You haven't seen—there's a lady in the boat!"

"Oh, is there?" The flash of white teeth showed in that diffused light spreading upward from the hatch. "The lady has only herself to blame."

"To blame? How is she to blame?"

"She disobeys the order."

"What order?" Grant couldn't yet see he had nothing to hope from the man. "You can't abandon us," he hurried on, "not a woman, anyway, to the torture of slow starvation."

"I'm not sure that I can." The captain's hand had gone up as though to stroke the absent mustache. When the hand came down, it showed his teeth again as he half turned toward the men behind him.

At those words, "I'm not sure that I can," the reaction in the lifeboat was so great that, with the snapping of the tension, Grant had wavered dizzily, and Nan sprang up with a cry—a cry that Newcomb took for relief till he saw her gesture toward Julian Grant. But nearer hands laid hold on him as he called out in hoarse triumph, "What did I tell you fellows!" and fell into the place they made for him. The commander turned from some humorous interchange with his officers.

"Yes, it's a fact, I can't bring myself to abandon the lady." He took up that position again near the edge of the conning-tower. With heels together he made a sharp inclination from the hips. "I have a cabin below, not luxurious, but more comfortable than—" he broke off with a curt gesture. "I place it at the lady's disposal."

On the lifeboat for those first seconds a silence of petrification reigned. On the submarine sounded voices—voices which hadn't been heard before. For one sick instant Newcomb tried to fit those sounds to expostulation, to revolt. And then hope died, transfixed by laughter.

But the commander himself was grave, almost decorous.

"Well, what do you say?" He was looking straight at the girl. "You must make up your mind quickly. I've wasted too much time already."

"Far too much," burst from a man's throat down below.

"Unless," the German went on calmly—"unless, as seems probable, the lady hasn't understood."

No wonder that he so interpreted the lady's face, for in the circumscribed field of intense light her eyes showed wide to an incredible vision. "It is true what your own people have told you," he went on. "To stay where you are means death."

She spoke directly to him for the first time.

"And these—these others!"

"The fate of men in war," said the commander. "There is no need for you to share it."

Only the rushing sound of the water for a breath's interval till she gave him the measure of her incorrigible hope. "You'll save the others, too!"

He checked his impatient gesture to demand: "You think they won't let you come—alone!" No wonder he persisted, for she was looking at him still with that excited hopefulness, though dashed now with bewilderment, her brows drawn together as though she were trying with all her might and main, in spite of dazzle and glare, to make out something dim and far and inconceivably precious—nothing less than an ultimate fate in man.

"I give you my word," he called out, "nobody shall prevent you."

"Yes, somebody will!" Julian shouted.

Twice fifteen hands were ready to make the assurance good. Four of them were laid to the oars. It was all over while you'd count half a dozen, but out of those flying seconds of half-paralyzed effort Newcomb kept the memory of a lifeboat that seemed to share the mortal agitations of her crew; a boat that for an instant—an eternity—swung under unequal oar-strokes in an oily glitter that swelled up black, polished, till it shut out the horizon stars.

As though no man had stirred, the Leyden captain was roaring: "What are you about? Shove off!" His voice thickened to incoherent cursing even before a couple of boat-hook heads crashed down on the gunwale and hauled the boat sharply back against the body of the submarine.

"Are you mad?" It wasn't lost on any one in the lifeboat that the German's free hand had found his pistol as he added: "Isn't there sense enough among you to know you're helpless? You've only the girl to thank that I don't ram you to hell." A word over his shoulder sent two of the crew down through that faint gush of light to the deck. "I'm sending for you."

"Julian!" After the guttural male voice, the high childish cry seemed to tear the quivering night in two.

Strangely it was answered. The pacifist Julian turned and flung himself upon the man at his side. He seemed to grapple insanely with the Leyden captain, till something in his keeping was torn out of his hand. Over their heads a shot rang out. Two sailors, about to board the lifeboat, hesitated, turned and vanished.

Newcomb was for the moment so sure it was the U-boat commander who had fired that his next impression was of a thing purely fantastic; for the figure up there against the stars, that figure inclined in a mockery of courtesy to Nan Ellis, jumped to attention; held the attitude rigidly an instant, and then, as though in pride of pose he had overreached himself, fell back. Men sprang to catch him and darkness closed round the dropped torch.

Out of the half-crazed confusion that followed, it was hard afterward to recall anything with both certainty and distinctness except the captain's rough order to Julian, "Here, give it back!" and a pistol changed hands. Newcomb had his share in wrenching the boat-hooks from their hold and in the feverish self-defeating activity of the oarsmen.

Out of the semi-darkness on the submarine torches spouted light. Out of the turmoil on conning-tower and deck, cries of fury crystallized to a single sentence repeated in German by a dozen tongues, "Axes! Axes! Stave her in!"

The first lieutenant gesticulated madly.

"Stop rowing instantly, or I fire!"

"Row! Row hard! For God's sake," Grant's voice prayed, "give me an oar!"

No one heeded; the rowers rowed for their lives. Two revolver-shots rang out, and the chief engineer rowed no more.

Instead of pursuing, the submarine had darted away. She was swinging half round a circle; she was, God in heaven! what now? She was heading this way again, coming at full speed.

Newcomb brought his eyes back to the faces nearest him. They showed him only that his own sick sense of helplessness was shared, and shared the remembrance of that threat, but for the girl. To ram the lifeboat? As easy as for a child to stick the end of a spoon through the breakfast egg.

On she came; you heard the mutter of her engines. He couldn't bring himself to look at the girl. For fear of meeting her eyes with knowledge in them at last Newcomb found himself turning dizzily away from all those stricken faces. In the teeth of death he remembered staring round the black half-circle of the heavens.

The very cloud-wrack was seized by fear ... it ran scudding away from the scene. It left naked the shivering stars. Two little sounds alone in all that silence: a sobbing of water against the sides of the boat; and that other, the low mutter of the oncoming doom.

In that final rush, the blackness in which the submarine moved, curled up and fell away from her bow like black earth on either side of a ploughshare—now like earth snow powdered.

That was the last thing Newcomb remembered—of the curling white lip of the bow wave as the engine of death came rushing at the lifeboat. That and voices in the extremity of horror that cried: "Jump! Jump!"

Those who didn't were not seen again.