already blasted by the explosion, it
had stood upright for those few seconds until a heave of the swell
snapped the charred stays and released it. Nay, even the dead beat
of the rain may have helped.

In all my life I have never known such rain. Its noise drowned the
thunderclap. It fell in no drops or threads of drops, but in one
solid flood as from a burst bag. It extinguished the blaze in the
rigging as easily as you would blow out a candle. It beat me down
prone upon the bowsprit, and with such force that I felt my ribs
giving upon the timber. It stunned me as a bather is stunned who,
swimming in a pool beneath a waterfall, ventures his head into the
actual cascade. It flooded the deck so that two minutes later, when
I managed to lift my head, I saw the bodies of two Moors washed down
the starboard scuppers and clean through a gap in the broken
bulwarks, their brown legs lifting as they toppled and shot over the
edge.

No wind had preceded the storm. The lightning had leapt out of a
still sky--still, that is, until jarred and set vibrating by the
explosion. But now, as the downpour eased, the wind came on us with
a howl, catching the ship so fierce a cuff, as she rolled with
mainsail set and no way on her, that she careened until the sea ran
in through her lee scuppers, and, for all the loss of her
mizzen-mast, came close to being thrown on her beam ends.

While she righted herself--which she began to do but slowly--I leapt
for the deck and ran aft, avoiding the jagged splinters, in time to
catch sight of my father's head and shoulders emerging through the
burst hatchway.

"Hullo!" he sang out cheerfully, lifting his voice against the wind.
"God be praised, lad! I was fearing we had lost you."

"But what has happened?" I shouted.

Before he could answer a voice hailed us over stern, and we hurried
aft to find Billy Priske dragging himself towards the ship by the
raffle of mizzen-rigging. We hoisted him in over the quarter, and
he dropped upon deck in a sitting posture.

"Is my head on?" he asked, taking it in both hands.

"You are hurt, Billy?"

"Not's I know by," answered Billy, and stared about him.
"What's become o' the brown vermin?"

"They seem to have disappeared," said my father, likewise looking
about him.

"But what on earth has happened?" I persisted, catching him by the
shoulder and shouting in his ear above the roar of a second sudden
squall.

"I--blew up--the ship. Captain