Page:Cruise of the Jasper B (1916).djvu/125

 henceforth her devoted cavalier. But she understood.

She extended her hand. Her answer was on her lips. But at that instant the jarring roar of an explosion struck the speech from them.

The blast was evidently near, though muffled. The earth shook; a tremor ran through the Jasper B.; the glasses leaped and rang upon the table. Cleggett, followed by Lady Agatha, darted up the companionway.

As Cleggett reached the deck there was a second shock, and he beheld a flame leap out of the earth itself—a sudden sword of fire thrust into the night from the midst of the sandy plain before him. The light that stabbed and was gone in an instant was about halfway between the Jasper B. and Morris's. A second after, a missile—which Cleggett later learned was a piece of rock the size of a man's head—fell with a splintering crash upon and through the wooden platform beside the Jasper B., not thirty feet from where Cleggett stood; another splashed into the canal. The next day Cleggett saw several of these fragments lying about the plain.

Calling to his men to bring lanterns—for the