rition. "I'll come closer."

He threw back the starting-lever, and the thing began moving. Then a
rifle-barrel protruded from a dead-light. There was a report and a
flash, and a bullet passed through his hair. The shock startled him,
and he lost his balance. In the effort to recover it his leg knocked
down the blade lever, and the steel cylinder sprang forward, leaving
him floundering in the water. Pointed upward, it appeared for a moment
on the surface, then dived like a porpoise and disappeared. In five
seconds something happened to the gunboat.

Coincident with a sound like near-by thunder, the black craft lifted
amidships like a bending jack-knife, and up from the shattered deck,
and out from ports, doors, and dead-lights, came a volcano of flame and
smoke. The sea beneath followed in a mound, which burst like a great
bubble, sending a cloud of steam and spray and whitish-yellow smoke
aloft to mingle with the first and meet the falling fragments. These
fell for several seconds--hatches, gratings, buckets, ladders,
splinters of wood, parts of men, and men whole, but limp.

A side-ladder fell near the choking and half-stunned sick man, and he
seized it. Before he could crawl on top the two halves of the gunboat
had sunk in a swirl of bubbles and whirlpools.

A few broken and bleeding swimmers approached to share his support, saw
his awful face in the moonlight, and swam away.

A few hours later a gray cruiser loomed up close by and directed a
search-light at him. Then a gray cutter full of white-clad men
approached and took him off the ladder. He was delirious again, and
bleeding from mouth, nose, and ears.

* * * * *

The surgeon and the torpedo-lieutenant came up from the sick-bay, the
latter with enthusiasm on his face,--for he was young,--and joined a
group of officers on the quarterdeck.

"He'll pull through, gentlemen," said the surgeon. "He is the man
Mosher lost overboard, though he doesn't know anything about it, nor
how he got on that sand-key. I suppose the _Destructor_ picked him
up and landed him. He found bread and water, he says. You see, the
first symptoms are similar in Yellow Jack and relapsing bilious fever.
I don't wonder that Mosher was nervous."

"Then it _was_ the _Destructor_?" asked an ensign, pulling out a
note-book and a pencil. "And Lieutenant Mosher was right, after all?"

"Yes; this man read her name before she blew up; and a Spanish sai