e from her
turret, and this time the shell, hurtling through the air with that
hissing song which every gunner knows so well, crashed full upon the
fore-part of the great liner, and we heard the shout of terror which
rose from those upon her decks. The men appeared at the signal-mast of
the pursuer, and rapidly made signals in the common code.

"Skipper, do you see that?--they're signalling," I cried out. "Get your
glass up and take a sight"; but he had already done so.

"It's the signal to lie to, and wait a boat," he said; "there's someone
going aboard."

The fulfilment of the reading was instant. While yet we had not
realised that the onward rush of the two boats was stayed the foam fell
away from their bows; and they rode the seas superbly, sitting the long
swells with a beautiful ease. But there was activity on the deck of the
nameless ship, the men were at the davits on the starboard side
swinging off a launch, which dropped presently into the sea with a crew
of some half-a-dozen men. For ourselves, we were now quite close up to
them, but so busily were they occupied that I believed we had escaped
all notice. Yet I got my glass full upon the man who walked the bridge;
and I knew him.

He was the man I had met in the Rue Joubert at Paris, the one styled
Captain Black by my friend Hall.

The last link in the long chain was welded then. The whole truth of
that weird document, so fantastical, so seemingly wild, so fearful, was
made manifest; the dead man's words were vindicated, his every
deduction was unanswerable. There on the great Atlantic waste, I had
lived to see one of those terrible pictures which he had conceived in
his long dreaming; and through all the excitement, above all the noise,
I thought that I heard his voice, and the grim "Ahoys!" of my own
seamen on the night he died.

This strange recognition was unknown to Roderick, who had never seen
Captain Black, nor had any notion of his appearance. But he waited for
some remark from me; yet, fearing to be heard, I only looked at him,
and in that look he read all.

"Mark," he said, "it's time to go; we'll be the next when that ship's
at the bottom."

"My God!" I answered, "he can't do such a thing as that. If I thought
so, I would stand by here at the risk of a thousand lives----"

"That's wild talk. What can we do? He would shiver us up with one of
his machine guns--and, besides, we have Mary on board."

Indeed, she stood by us as we spoke, ver