Men cried out shrilly. There was a roaring as of an enraged bull from the bridge. Wolver came out from under the tarpaulin and went on all fours across the depth bombs and miscellaneous cargo in the well deck; he found the little passageway left amidships and crossed it and continued to the starboard side. He looked out tensely over the moonlit water.

  At first he could see nothing, rake the half-circle of the horizon as he might. That shot began to seem unreal, in the quiet of the night, under that pallid moonshine. He looked forward and saw a dark cluster of figures in the starboard bridge wing. Quiet, now. And no shot came from the sea.

  Then he saw it—a mastlike thing above a thicker uprearing column. Moving steadily and with some rapidity, for the freighter. Closer and closer. He could make out figures forward of the conning tower, clustered about a deck gun. Fascinated, he watched it overhaul the Willamette. Then as he stared at the German gun crew, it came to him that it was standing nearer for a better shot. And he was squatting on a deckload of T.N.T.!

  “God!” he whispered. “There won’t be enough left of us to make a pair of mitts for a chee-chee bird! Doll rags is what we’ll be! Doll rags! We’ll have to be toted up the golden stairs— the bunch of us together—in a hand-basket! My stars! An’ not a show to fight back!”

  Now only a hundred yards separated the lumpy old freighter and the lean, wolfish U-boat. A man appeared in the moonlight, coming from the conning-tower hatch. His squat silhouette showed an officer’s cap. He lifted a speaking trumpet to his mouth.

  “Willamette, ahoy!” he hailed the freighter, in very good English, that seemed queer, coming from a German craft.

  “What d’ you want?” the Willamette’s skipper demanded grimly, with an evenness that barely hid his rage.

  “I’m going to sink you. That shot was a mere indicator of my intention. I’ve been watching you for two days, now. I intended to sink you last night, but that other fool was nearer. And that damned cruiser all but sank me. I don’t know how he missed me, even now.”

  “I could tell you—plenty!” Wolver gritted.

  “What’m I s’posed to do?” the Willamette skipper growled.

  “Well, you can, of course, use your own judgment, as to whether you’ll remain on board while we blow up your ship! But if you move very quickly, I give you permission to take to the boats. But, understand, it is quite immaterial to me! You may be blown up and be damned to you!”

  “How you figurin’ to blow her up?” One might have thought the derbied skipper was discussing an impersonal point of seamanship, to hear his level voice.

  “What concern is that of yours?” the German officer roared, with an oath. “Ask me more silly questions, and I will put a shell through you, here and now! Where are your papers? Leave them on the bridge when you abandon your ship. I will have my men take them when they come aboard with bombs. And, captain, try no tricks! Else you may find yourself in the water, trying to row a sunken boat! Hurry to get those papers!”

  Wolver scowled. Not much of an ending to his scheme. Then the derby-hatted skipper appeared in the passage left between the deckload. He was swearing furiously, in a cold even tone, as he came. Wolver stood up in front of him and the skipper stopped, leaning forward a trifle to stare.

  “Goin’ to abandon ship, sir?” Wolver inquired. “Nothin’ else we can do? Oh, I’m a passenger you don’t know. I fell overboard off the Shenandoah a couple hours ago, and clumb onto you. I used to be in the armed guard, and I was figurin’ you would tote me to Queenstown and I’d git back to the guard.”

  “Abandon ship!” the skipper snarled. “What the hell else can I do? I’d give a year’s pay for a gun and a few of your boys to send me a three-inch shell into that sarcastic sucker out there. But we got no gun. An’ if I don’t shake a leg with my piapers, that Heinie’ll be puttin’ a shell into us. You better go for’ard and stand by a boat.”

  “No, by God,” Wolver grated, for a great and wonderful inspiration had come to him. It set him shaking at first, then he steadied to a tenseness like a violin’s string. If only it would work—if only it could—

  “Gi’ me a hand, cap’n! Quick! I betcha these ash cans, here, they got the detonatin’ fuses in! If me and you, cap’n, we could git one unlashed and tumble her overside—could do it before that Fritz could slam a shell into us!”

  “Huh?” the skipper grunted explosively. He whirled and stared out at the sub and shook his head. “He’d be onto us! He’d have a shell through our side before we could do it.”

  “It’s a chance!” Wolver urged him fiercely. “What kind of sailor are you, anyhow! Looky! He’s got that gun of his trained to the bow. You got nothin’ explosive there! He ain’t really skeered? He knows you got no guns. If he should see us wrestlin’ with the ash can and they try to bring that gun around to bear on this well deck— hell, we will have it up before he can turn the trick. You game?”

  “I never see a navy man that ud do what I wouldn’t!” the skipper gritted. “Let’s cast loose one close to the side.”

  “Uh-uh! One of these, here! Then we can roll her over the others, right fast, and hoist her over the bulwark.”

  * * * *

  His jackknife appeared twinklingly. He slashed wildly at securing lines. Now, from the German, came a sudden angry and impatient hail. He wanted to know what the devil was keeping the Willamette’s skipper.

  “Two minutes I give him!” he finished. “Two minutes! Then I will sink you with shell fire, and you can swim!”

  “Up she goes!” Wolver grunted. “Heave and bust her! Good and heavy! There she is. Now, if we can kind of keep down and roll her—”

  “Lord!” the skipper breathed suddenly. “Boy, you ever see one of these things go off? She’ll strain our seams! We ought to be goin’ like hell away when we drop her. Hold ever’thing a minute. I got an engine room voice-tube back here. Le’ me warn Mac.”

  He vanished. From the sub came the German officer’s voice again—angrier, grimmer. One minute left—forty-five seconds—The skipper reappeared, and with his hands on the big can, there came a trembling from the engine room to the deck. The Willamette was going ahead.

  “Now, if we can make it before he decides to turn loose!”

  They rolled the depth bomb across the tarpaulined tops of its mates; paused a moment at the bulwark.

  “I will fire—” the German began.

  “Up she goes! Over—she—goes!”

  They strained their muscles in that last great heave. Up to the bulwark. And Wolver dropped flat upon his back, catching hold of projections, drawing back his feet. They pushed out upon the poised bomb with all the force of his wiry body— pushed it out in an arc that cleared the low side. It struck with a splash. They peered fearfully overside. The Germans had whirled to gape.

  The German bellowed something in his native tongue. No need of translation. The bellow of the sub’s gun and the crash as the shell, fired at fifty yards, plowed through the old vessel under the bridge, told what his command had been.

  There came an echo to that roar, an indescribable explosion under water. The Willamette, forging ahead under cranky old engines, was barely out from above the bomb. A geyser of water rose high and the stern of the freighter lifted, lifted, lifted, with agonized groan of ancient plates. Wolver found himself hanging half over the bulwark, with the skipper tumbled across his legs. His head had struck something with a resounding crack, and he saw whole constellations of stars. He was out for a fleeting period.

  “Gone!” the skipper croaked in his ear, dragging him inboard. “My Lord! Never see anything like that! Just lifted her up and swamped her. Likely opened every seam in that sardine can, an’—an’—I bet it did almost as much on this’n’!”

  He scrambled up and fled. Wolver followed him toward the collapsed bridge. The freighter’s deck force and all of the engineer’s force who were off-watch, were clustered here. They had been standing by boat falls, ready to abandon the ship. They stared incredulously, even yet, out to where the sub had vanished.

  Wolver stood with them. The skipper appeared presently. To the mate he said that she was leaking, but the well showed nothing alarming. The pumps were taking care of it.

  An hour passed. Then a lean gray shape materialized like a greyhound, and came alongside. Captain Banning’s voice sounded anxiously. The derbied skipper of the Willamette thrust his head over the port bridge rail and jerked the rim of his derby a bit to starboard, over a cold blue eye. Very briefly he told his tale.

  “A navy man?” Banning shouted. “Why—a seaman named Dean, who fell overboard? Where is he?”

  “Here, sir,” Wolver answered drearily. “I reckon there ain’t a chance of stayin’ aboard, sir?”

  “No, you’ll have to come back. But—well, I’ll lower a boat for you.”

  Not on the bridge did Captain Banning interview him. It was in the privacy of the cabin, with only the exec by to hear. And at Wolver’s account, interlarded with his burning desire to return to the armed guard, Captain Banning stiffened.

  “Cohoxon?” he snapped. “You were on the Cohoxon? Are you, by any chance, the pointer who sank that sub? Why—why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “You never ask me, sir.”

  “Well, I think you can help me win a bet with the executive officer. If you can—and you can tell me the truth without any worries concerning results—I’ll promise you a transfer back to the armed guard. Now, did you, or did you not, actually fall overboard?”

  Wolver stared at his feet, then looked up. “How was you a-bettin’, sir?” he asked.

  “That you jumped! For I never saw a man more set on any duty than you seemed to be set on that detail.”

  “Well, sir, I just don’t know whether you won that bet, or not. I never fell overboard— exactly. Nor yet I never jumped. I was right skeered of the propellers, so I dived! An’ swum like ever’thing. It looked like a chance to git back to wolvin’, sir, sea-wolvin’.”

  “I win, and you win!” said Captain Banning, with a faint note of helplessness. “Wolving is certainly your line!”

  WHEN A YANK GETS FIGHTING MAD, by Lieut. Jay D. Blaufox

  I.

  Doctor Mikhail Tchekov, American military surgeon attached to the Russian Army and stationed in Amavir in the Caucasus, waited in front of the camp where the Soviets kept their German prisoners on the outside of the town.

  As he stood before the gates of the barbed wire entanglements waiting to be admitted, he remembered to keep well back from the gate. One touch of the wire before the electric switches were pulled which charged them, and he—or anyone— would need a doctor. That is, if he survived the terrific electric shock.

  A guard strode to the gate. He swung it wide and saluted.

  “Thank you, Pavrovitch,” said Mickey nodding at the Russian. “I hear we have a new batch of prisoners today.”

  “Da,” replied the guard Pavrovitch. “General Timoshenko has added another five hundred to his collection of Nazi dogs for his great kennel.”

  Mickey laughed. He entered the enclosure.

  The gang at the hospital called him Mickey. Mickey Checkoff and even the nurses dared call him that—though they did it quietly, respectfully, and even affectionately, for everyone in the hospital situated on the left bank of the Kuban River liked the tall, handsome, dark-eyed American. They liked his jokes, his broad smile, and the noise he made with his tongue—a sort of clucking noise—twice. When he said anything that tickled his hearer, a broad wink always accompanied it from one of his laughing eyes.

  “Do I have to examine the whole five hundred, Pavrovitch?” he asked smilingly.

  “Only fifty, doctor,” replied Pavrovitch. “The others have been examined.”

  Mickey strode on to a low, rambling pinewood building, at one end of the camp.

  He walked past dozens of small groups of half-starved, weary Nazis in ragged grey-green uniforms. He saw the toes of many of them sticking through rotten, worn-out boots. Their coats and britches were torn, badly patched, or pinned together.

  As he passed one man separated from the rest, the German stopped him.

  “Herr doktor.”

  Mickey stopped.

  “Oh! Hello Heinsel,” he greeted in perfect German.

  Heinsel was a small man, of the type which might have been obese if he had been well fed enough.

  “Wie gehts?” asked Mickey.

  “Sehr gut!” smiled Heinsel. The man never complained; at least, not to the American. It was odd seeing an American uniform among the German and Russians in camp.

  * * * *

  Mickey and Heinsel were old friends. They had known each other when Mickey was taking a postgraduate course in medicine at the Breslau University. Heinsel gave up surgery when he lost an arm in the attack on Moscow.

  “I just wanted to let you know that one of your new prisoners is Von Starheim,” Heinsel warned him. “You’ll meet him in the examining hut.”

  Mickey’s face was not a poker face. He showed his surprise plainly. Then he smiled.

  “Really,” he grinned. “We meet even here.”

  “Hitler may yearn to rule the world,” Heinsel added. “But one thing is certain; if he wins, he won’t be able to make it any larger—or any smaller.”

  “So my old sword-swinging Von Starheim is a guest of ours,” mused Mickey.

  “I shall always remember how you used to beat him to a pulp with your fists in the good old American fashion while he would insist on using broadswords in your duels,” recalled Heinsel as if it were something pleasant to remember.

  “So will he, I’ll bet,” smiled Mickey. “He swore to kill me for it someday. Said I was responsible for disgracing him at the University; making a laughing stock of him for refusing to fight in the prescribed German fashion; making him resign from the College of Medicine, he said.” Mickey looked away from Heinsel as he reminisced. He turned back to the smaller, bespectacled man. “Do you think he meant what he said,” he grinned. “Do you really think he’ll try to kill me?”

  Heinsel was not smiling. His undernourished face was serious. “I’d be careful if I were you, Mickey,” he urged. “I’ve seen Von Starheim in action. He is capable of anything.”

  Mickey smiled at the German.

  “Thank you for the tip, Heinsel,” he said reassuringly. “I’ll be careful.”

  As Mickey entered the low building, a Russian orderly who could speak German cried: “All right you men, line up for examination.”

  The Nazi prisoners complied.

  “I’ll take the officers first,” ordered Mickey.

  “Officers fall in up front,” shouted the orderly again.

  Mickey placed his kitbag in one of the pine compartments on the long examining table of bare pine. He removed his blouse and hung it up on a hook and put on the long, white coat that it replaced.

  The first ten men Mickey examined were officers; the eleventh was Von Starheim.

  “Well,” said Mickey by way of greeting. “Fancy meeting you here, Von Starheim.”

  The German’s eyes glowed with the hate that was born in a University classroom in Germany, and the kind of hate Mickey knew would be carried into eternity.

  “I won’t stay here very long, Tchekov,” replied the man bitterly. “I don’t like the place; and I don’t like the people.”

  “Oh, you’ll get used to us,” encouraged Mickey. “We’re not like the Nazis at all. We treat our prisoners with kindness and medicine. Not with bullets and bayonets.”

  “I’ll stake my life that I’m not in this prison camp twenty-four hours,” boasted the German.

  “Come now,” said Mickey. “You should be a good guest if you want your host to treat you with affability. If you have any information that would be helpful to him, as long as you accept his hospitality and his food, you should reciprocate in kind.”

  * * * *

  Mickey looked at Von Starheim. He could see fires of intense passion burning in the man’s soul; the passion to kill. Mickey became serious as he applied the stethoscope to the Nazi’s broad chest. Why couldn’t Americans be like that? This man represented the most hateful thing on earth; the domination of races and peoples so far superior to the Nazi stupidmen that it was a pleasure to kill for the ambition. Yet great nations went down in the mad onrush of Heinie brutality only because they were not trained as the Nazis were; to destroy everything opposing them in their insane path; to kill everything that lived whether it was a simple flower, or an innocent child that chanced to be under its stiff, unrelenting, goose-stepping, hobnailed boots.

  Mickey examined Von Starheim from head to feet.

  “Your luck seems to be with you, Von Starheim,” he said. “You’re in pretty good shape.”

  “I intend to continue to be,” replied the man, his chest expanding with arrogant Nazi pride.

  “You look a lot better fed than most of the officers I’ve just examined,” remarked the American.

  “And why not?” asked Von Starheim. “I am a Staff officer.”

  “Well,” Mickey observed, “you always did take good care of that body of yours. Even at Breslau.”

  Von Starheim’s face darkened.

  “I haven’t forgotten Breslau,” said Von Starheim bitterly. “I swore to kill you then for disgracing me at the University, and now that we are at war, my job will be a lot easier.”

  “You disgraced yourself, my friend,” reminded Mickey. “Your arrogance got you into trouble not only with me, but with the faculty as well. If you were asked to resign, the fault lay with you, not with me.”

  “I would not have suffered the ridicule from the other students if you had fought honorably,” replied Von Starheim.

  “Fighting honorably, as you put it,” said Mickey, “is not in the Nazi category. It is also a matter of geography. In my country we fight with our fists; not with broadswords. If I were a German—which, thank God, I am not—I might have fought you that way—and killed you.”