Page:The Iron Pirate 1905.djvu/148

134 side, and now barred her passage. At last, she was to cope with one worthy of her, and at the promise of battle, a hush, awful in its intensity, fell upon all of us.

For some minutes the two vessels lay, the one broadside to the other, the Americans making signals which were unanswered; but the nameless ship had now hundreds of men about her decks, and these were at the machine-guns and elsewhere active in preparation. It became plain that her captain had made up his mind to some plan, for the great hull swung round slowly, and passed at a moderate speed past the bow of the other. When she was nearly clear, her two great guns were fired almost simultaneously, and, as the shells swept along the deck of the cruiser, they carried men and masts and deck-houses with them, in one devilish confusion of wreckage and of death. To such an onslaught there was no answer. The cruiser was utterly unprepared for the treachery, and lay reeling on the sea; screams and fearful cries coming from her decks, now quivering under a torrent of fire as her opponent treated her to the hail of her machine-guns.

The battle could have ended but in one way, had not the other American warships now come so close to us that they opened fire with their great guns. The huge shells hissed over our heads, and all about us, plunging into the sea