rom it
rocked them. Zaidos watched the Zeppelin with fascinated eyes. It
circled round and round, in an effort to get over the biggest ship. A
shot leaped up at it, and missed. The Zeppelin rose a little, then
returned to the attack. Another shot narrowly missed it; but at that
instant a bomb dropped like a plummet. It was a close miss. Zaidos
could see wood fly as it clipped the prow and exploded as it reached
the sea, doing but little damage.

"Look! Look!" cried Velo.

Another battleship was coming, and another, until before them five
great monsters battled. The Zeppelin returned to the attack, and
Zaidos himself cried, "Look! Look!" as a swift gleam of light across
the water, on a line with his eyes, betrayed the lightning swift course
of a torpedo. It struck the ship, and at the same moment the Zeppelin
dropped an accurate bomb. There was a terrific explosion as the
torpedo struck amidships, a spurt of flame as the bomb scattered its
inflammable gases over the decks, and fire burst out everywhere.
Another torpedo tore into the ship. Zaidos' eyes bulged as he watched,
the monster ship flaming and roaring with repeated explosions, her own
guns valiantly firing to the last. As she plunged nose-first into the
sea, the boys could see the crew, like ants, pouring, leaping over the
side, only to go down in the vast whirlpool made by the sinking vessel.

The Zeppelin now soared skyward, made a wide circle that took it almost
out of sight, and returned to attack another ship. Then a strange
thing happened. The upleaping shot from the battleship crossed the
bomb from the Zeppelin in mid-air, and as the bomb exploded on the deck
of the cruiser, the shell from her aeroplane gun hit the delicate body
of the airship and tore through it. As the Zeppelin came whirling
down, turning over and over in the air, Zaidos could see the crew
spilling out like little black pills out of a torn box. That they were
men, human beings whirling to a dreadful death, did not occur to him.
He had lost all sense of human values in the terrible pageant before
him.

It seemed like a picture show, only with the vivid colors of reality
and the deafening noise of exploding shells. Once they felt the
submarine pass under them, so close that it made an eddy that pulled
them toward the combating ships. When it came up to release its dart,
the boys were too intent on keeping themselves enough out of the sea
wash to breathe, to see whe