oats of the
oxen (there were seven of them, and there would be plenty of beef in
camp that night at any rate); there was a dead horse, two badly wounded
men and a hundred feet away a man lying on his face, hatless, just as he
had been blown there: dead, or as good as dead. It appeared that two
fliers had come from opposite directions and most of the crowd had seen
but the one, while the other dropped the bomb. It had struck just
outside the busiest part of the camp, aimed very likely at the stores
piled there. It had made a hole only five or six feet wide and two or
three feet deep, but it had blown everything in the neighborhood out
from it, as the captain had said. Holes you could put your fist in were
torn in the flanks of the oxen by flying stones and chunks of metal, and
the tires of some of the wagons, sixty or seventy feet away, had been
cut through like wax.

The ground was cleared, the men returned to work, and we even went in
swimming, but at every unexpected noise one looked upward, and when
about five o'clock the crowd scattered again, I will confess that I
watched that little speck buzzing nearer, on a line that would bring him
straight overhead, with an interest considerably less casual than any I
had bestowed on these birds before. There we were, confined in our
little amphitheatre; there was that diabolical bird peering down at us,
and in another minute, somewhere in that space, would come that
earth-shaking explosion--a mingling of crash and vohou'! There was no
escaping it, no dodging it, nothing to get under but empty air.

I had decided that the beach, about a hundred yards away from the
wharfs, was the safest place and hurried there; but the speck overhead,
as if anticipating me, seemed to be aiming for the precise spot. It is
difficult under such circumstances to sit tight, reasoning calmly that,
after all, the chances of the bomb's not landing exactly there are a
good many to one--you demand at least the ostrich-like satisfaction of
having something overhead. So I scurried over to the left to get out
from under what seemed his line of flight, when what should he do but
begin to turn!

This was really rubbing it in a bit. To fly across as he had that
morning was one thing, but to pen one up in a nice little pocket in the
hills, and then on a vertical radius of three or four thousand feet, to
circle round over one's head--anything yet devised by the human
nightmare was crude and immature t