Chief Gunner Mowrey and his crew in the torpedo chamber forward were signaled to “stand by the guns ready for action,” which meant in this case the huge firing tubes and the Whitehead torpedoes.  Jack and Ted fell into their places, stripped to the waist, and making sure that the reserve torpedoes were ready for any emergency.

By adjusting the headpiece of the ship’s microphone to his ears Chief Electrician Sammy Smith kept close tabs on the approaching vessel with the underwater telephone.  With the receivers to his hears he could hear plainly the swish of the vessel’s propeller blades as she bore down upon the floating submarine.  With his reports as a basis for their deductions, the Dewey’s officers were able to figure out the position of the mystery ship and to tell accurately the distance between the two vessels.

“Reckon he’ll be dead off our bow in a minute or so,” observed Cleary as he completed another observation based on Smith’s latest report.

McClure sprang again to the periscope.

“Yes, we ought to get a line on him soon enough now,” was his rejoinder.

For a moment the two officers studied the haze of the night sea around them, unable yet to discern the form of the approaching vessel.  And then came a huge specter, looming up directly off the starboard quarter of the Dewey in the proportions of a massive warship.

“Looks like a German cruiser,” said the American lieutenant as he gripped the brass wheel of the periscope and gave himself intently to the task of divining the identity of the unknown ship.

Cleary was making observations at the reserve periscope, the two officers having plunged the conning tower of the Dewey in utter darkness that they might better observe the shadowy hulk bearing down upon them.

“It is a German cruiser—–­Plauen class—–­and coming up in a hurry at better than twenty knots,” exclaimed McClure, as the outline of the ship was implanted clean-cut against the horizon dead ahead of the Dewey.

His hand on the firing valve, the submarine commander waited only until the bow of the German warship showed on the range glass of the periscope, and then released a torpedo.

Instantly a great volume of compressed air swirled into the upper port chamber; the bowcap was opened and the missile sped on its way.

“Gee, I hope that ‘moldy’ lands her!” shouted Jack at the sound of the discharged torpedo.

Although but a short time in the North Sea and just getting well acquainted with their English cousins, the American lads were fast learning the lingo of the deep.  To every man aboard the Dewey a torpedo was a “moldy,” so named by the English seamen.