proper for one of them to gently prod
a "vagrant of the sea" with the steel prow and send her below to
trouble no more. But it may be that the sight of the Cuban flag,
floating defiantly in the gale, had something to do with the full speed
at which the Spanish ship approached. When but half a length separated
the two craft, a heavy sea lifted the bow of the cruiser high in air;
then it sank, and the sharp steel ram came down like a butcher's
cleaver on the side of the derelict.

A great semicircular wall of red shut out the gray of the sea and sky
to leeward, and for an instant the horrified men in the boat saw--as
people see by a lightning flash--dark lines radiating from the centre
of this red wall, and near this centre poised on end in mid-air, with
deck and sponsons still intact, a bowless, bottomless remnant of the
cruiser. Then, and before the remnant sank into the vortex beneath,
the spectacle went out in the darkness of unconsciousness; for a
report, as of concentrated thunder, struck them down. A great wave had
left the crater-like depression in the sea, which threw the boat on
end, and with the inward rush of surrounding water rose a mighty gray
cone, which then subsided to a hollow, while another wave followed the
first. Again and again this gray pillar rose and fell, each subsidence
marked by the sending forth of a wave. And long before these
concentric waves had lost themselves in the battle with the
storm-driven combers from the ocean, the half-filled boat, with her
unconscious passengers, had drifted over the spot where lay the
shattered remnant, which, with the splintered fragments of wood and
iron strewn on the surface and bottom of the sea for a mile around, and
the lessening cloud of dust in the air, was all that was left of the
derelict _Neptune_ and one of the finest cruisers in the Spanish navy.

A few days later, two exhausted, half-starved men pulled a whaleboat up
to the steps of the wharf at Cadiz, where they told some lies and sold
their boat. Six months after, these two men, sitting at a camp-fire of
the Cuban army, read from a discolored newspaper, brought ashore with
the last supplies, the following:

"By cable to the 'Herald.'

"CADIZ, March 13, 1895.--Anxiety for the safety of the _Reina Regente_
has grown rapidly to-day, and this evening it is feared, generally,
that she went down with her four hundred and twenty souls in the storm
which swept the southern coast on Sunday nigh