been a gun placed in Union Square. It had never been
mounted, much less fired, and in the darkness after the surrender it was
taken with its supplies and put out of the way under the arches of the
great Dexter building. Here late in the morning it was remarked by a
number of patriotic spirits. They set to work to hoist and mount it
inside the upper floors of the place. They made, in fact, a masked
battery behind the decorous office blinds, and there lay in wait as
simply excited as children until at last the stem of the luckless
Wetterhorn appeared, beating and rolling at quarter speed over the
recently reconstructed pinnacles of Tiffany's. Promptly that one-gun
battery unmasked. The airship's look-out man must have seen the whole
of the tenth story of the Dexter building crumble out and smash in the
street below to discover the black muzzle looking out from the shadows
behind. Then perhaps the shell hit him.

The gun fired two shells before the frame of the Dexter building
collapsed, and each shell raked the Wetterhorn from stem to stern.
They smashed her exhaustively. She crumpled up like a can that has been
kicked by a heavy boot, her forepart came down in the square, and the
rest of her length, with a great snapping and twisting of shafts and
stays, descended, collapsing athwart Tammany Hall and the streets
towards Second Avenue. Her gas escaped to mix with air, and the air of
her rent balloonette poured into her deflating gas-chambers. Then with
an immense impact she exploded....

The Vaterland at that time was beating up to the south of City Hall
from over the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the reports of the gun,
followed by the first crashes of the collapsing Dexter building, brought
Kurt and, Smallways to the cabin porthole. They were in time to see the
flash of the exploding gun, and then they were first flattened against
the window and then rolled head over heels across the floor of the cabin
by the air wave of the explosion. The Vaterland bounded like a football
some one has kicked and when they looked out again, Union Square was
small and remote and shattered, as though some cosmically vast giant had
rolled over it. The buildings to the east of it were ablaze at a dozen
points, under the flaming tatters and warping skeleton of the airship,
and all the roofs and walls were ridiculously askew and crumbling as one
looked. "Gaw!" said Bert. "What's happened? Look at the people!"

But before Kurt could prod