e.

"Coming up astern, he kicked out a bomb just before he was over her port
quarter, but it only shot across her diagonally, and struck the water on
her starboard side, about a hundred feet away. It went off with, if
anything, a sharper crack than the one which had struck the poop, and
the foam geyser the explosion shot up flashed a bloody red for the
instant the water took to chill the glow of the molten thermit.

"Vanishing even more quickly was a ragged red star which fluttered for a
moment beneath the surface of the water itself as the flame stabs shot
out in all directions from the central core of the explosion.

"No water was thrown aboard us, and, near as I was to the explosion on
the bridge, the rush of air could hardly be felt. Something that came
tinkling down after striking the side of the charthouse, however--I
picked it up when the show was over--turned out to be a thin fragment of
the steel casing of the bomb.

"A similar fragment, twisted into a peculiar shape, struck the chest of
a man leaning over the rail in the waist of the ship, inflicting a
slight flesh wound the exact shape of a ragged capital 'C.'

"That any kind of a living man could really be trying to destroy a mere
merchant ship in cold blood seemed to me so monstrous, so utterly
impossible, that, until the second bomb was dropped, I was almost ready
to believe that the first had been launched by accident. From then on
we knew it was a fight for life.

"The Hun took a broader swerve in bringing his machine round for the
next charge, and, ten times quicker on his helm than we were,
anticipated our next shift of course, and came darting down on an almost
straight fore-and-aft line again. The sudden cloud of our foreblown
smoke--there was a following wind on the 'leg' they had put her on at
the moment--which engulfed him at the instant his third bomb was
released was the one thing in the world that could have made him miss so
easy a 'sitter.' The quick 'side-flip' the sharply-banked 'plane gave to
the dropped missile threw it wide by twice the distance the second had
missed us. Though the detonation rang sharp and clear, and though a
vicious spout of foam shot up, I could note no effect of the thing
whatever on the ship. Whether that was his last bomb or not we could
never be quite sure. At any rate, it was the last he tried to drop upon
us, or upon any other ship for that matter.

"Just why he returned to the attack with his machine-gun