Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/119

 she knew—to wreck an undersea craft if the charge burst close by.

The Starke was still leaping on with its length showing to the Ribot when two hundred yards or more astern the destroyer, a great geyser of water leaped into the air fifty—a hundred feet; and while the column of water still seemed to mushroom up and up, a tremendous shock battered the Ribot.

Someone shouted out in French while another called in English, "Depth charge dropped from the destroyer!"

"There was one 'ashcan, Gerry Hull murmured. "Now for another!"

For the Starke, as soon as the charge had detonated, had put her helm about and was circling back with marvelous swiftness to cross again the spot in the sea where she had dropped the great bomb.

Men were below that spot of sea, Ruth knew—German men, fifty or eighty or a hundred of them, perhaps. They were young men, mostly, not unlike—in their physical appearance, at least—German-born boys whom she had known at home in Onarga or in Chicago. Some of that crew might, conceivably, even be cousins of those boys. They had mothers and sisters in homes at Hamburg or Dresden or Munich or perhaps in that delightful toy town of Nuremberg, which she knew and had loved from pictures and stories; or some of them came, perhaps, from the Black Forest—from those quaint, lovely homely woodland cottages which Howard Pyle and Grimm had taught her to love when she was a child. They were helpless down there below the sea at this moment, perhaps, with the seams of their boat opened by that tremendous