Page:Cruise of the Dry Dock.djvu/308

 The wind snatched at the clothes and bandages of the intent men. Masses of seaweed swept like gray blurs down the sheer of the tug's wake. Just beneath them the propeller rushed with watery thunder.

“Yonder she rises!” cried one of the watchers, pointing at two wireless masts that rose like the fins of a racing shark above the green surface of the Sargasso.

“Yonder she rises!” repeated a voice amidship, and more faintly still came the repetition from the bridge, “Yonder she rises—hard a-port!”

A sudden shift of the rudder shook the Vulcan from peak to keelson. Next moment the tug was speeding squarely across a seaweed field, and another crook was added to the smoke mark in the sky. The Vulcan's blunt prow drove through the seaweed at a great rate, while the clammy mass swung back together not sixty yards behind the churning screw.

A strange race had developed between the tug and submarine. When both crafts were on the surface in open water, the submarine had a knot or two advantage of the Vulcan and could have