like a thing alive, halting and
then coming on again, with her torn and bent propeller still beating the
air. The bursting flames spluttered out again in clouds of steam. It was
a disaster gigantic in its dimensions. She lay across the rapids like
an island, like tall cliffs, tall cliffs that came rolling, smoking, and
crumpling, and collapsing, advancing with a sort of fluctuating rapidity
upon Bert. One Asiatic airship--it looked to Bert from below like three
hundred yards of pavement--whirled back and circled two or three times
over that great overthrow, and half a dozen crimson flying-machines
danced for a moment like great midges in the sunlight before they swept
on after their fellows. The rest of the fight had already gone over the
island, a wild crescendo of shots and yells and smashing uproar. It was
hidden from Bert now by the trees of the island, and forgotten by him in
the nearer spectacle of the huge advance of the defeated German airship.
Something fell with a mighty smashing and splintering of boughs unheeded
behind him.

It seemed for a time that the Hohenzollern must needs break her back
upon the Parting of the Waters, and then for a time her propeller
flopped and frothed in the river and thrust the mass of buckling,
crumpled wreckage towards the American shore. Then the sweep of the
torrent that foamed down to the American Fall caught her, and in another
minute the immense mass of deflating wreckage, with flames spurting out
in three new places, had crashed against the bridge that joined Goat
Island and Niagara city, and forced a long arm, as it were, in a heaving
tangle under the central span. Then the middle chambers blew up with a
loud report, and in another moment the bridge had given way and the main
bulk of the airship, like some grotesque cripple in rags, staggered,
flapping and waving flambeaux to the crest of the Fall and hesitated
there and vanished in a desperate suicidal leap.

Its detached fore-end remained jammed against that little island, Green
Island it used to be called, which forms the stepping-stone between the
mainland and Goat Island's patch of trees.

Bert followed this disaster from the Parting of the Waters to the bridge
head. Then, regardless of cover, regardless of the Asiatic airship
hovering like a huge house roof without walls above the Suspension
Bridge, he sprinted along towards the north and came out for the first
time upon that rocky point by Luna Island that looks