stionably could. He had set a cold corn-cob pipe between his
teeth; he answered nothing, but his fascinated saucer eyes were fixed on
the precise spot where as it seemed the boom was destined to be planted.
This was at a place about six feet below the square of soapstone with a
hole in it, through which the stovepipe passed. He was not disappointed.
The boom in fact exerted its whole pressure against the body of the
stove itself, with the result which we have seen. The stove made its way
across the kitchen and appeared in the bedroom at the moment when Elmer
had made up his lips to blow the flame.

Nor was this all. The inexorable stern of the _Minnie Williams_ followed
after, raising the roof of the Higgins place with the skillful care of
an epicure taking the cover off his favorite dish. The roof yielded with
only a gentle rippling motion, and the ship's lifeboat, which hung from
davits aft, scraped the remains of supper off the supper table with her
keel.

Zinie Shadd, returning late from a lodge meeting which had wound up with
a little supper in the banquet hall, felt a queer stir through his
members to see the Higgins place alter its usually placid countenance,
falter, turn half round, and get down on its knees with an apparently
disastrous collapse of its four walls and of everything within them. The
short wide windows narrowed and lengthened with an effect of bodily
agony as the ribs of the place were snapped off short all round the
eaves.

"God help them poor creatures inside!" he was moved to utter out of the
goodness of his heart. "She went in jest as easy," he recounted later to
one of his cronies. "It warn't no more exertion for her than 't would be
to you to stick your finger through a cream puff."

"How come it they 'scaped with a whole skin?"

"I don't see for the life of me. Elmer says himself it's just another
case of where it's _for_ a man to live, and if it ain't for him to he
won't, and if it's for him to be will, and that's about all there is to
it."

Elmer's exact phrase has been that he guessed nothing coming from the
sea side would ever cheat the gallows.

Pearl Higgins told a friend of hers that the one thing that came into
her mind as she lay there was that the place had been torpedoed.

"I knew what it was just as well as I wanted to," she said. She had
known all along that if any place would get it it would be the Higgins
place, on account of its exposed position, right in line with