Don't stop. Pull away. Hold on, there; hold on, you
fools!" he shouted. "That's a torpedo; keep away from her!"
Forgetting his own injunction to "pull away," the doctor stood up,
waving his oar frantically, and Boston assisted. But if their shouts
and gestures were understood aboard the cruiser, they were ignored.
She slowly turned in a wide curve and headed straight for the _Neptune_
which had drifted to leeward of her.
What was in the minds of the officers on that cruiser's deck will never
be known. Cruisers of all nations hold roving commissions in regard to
derelicts, and it is fitting and proper for one of them to gently prod
a "vagrant of the sea" with the steel prow and send her below to
trouble no more. But it may be that the sight of the Cuban flag,
floating defiantly in the gale, had something to do with the full speed
at which the Spanish ship approached. When but half a length separated
the two craft, a heavy sea lifted the bow of the cruiser high in air;
then it sank, and the sharp steel ram came down like a butcher's
cleaver on the side of the derelict.
A great semicircular wall of red shut out the gray of the sea and sky
to leeward, and for an instant the horrified men in the boat saw--as
people see by a lightning flash--dark lines radiating from the centre
of this red wall, and near this centre poised on end in mid-air, with
deck and sponsons still intact, a bowless, bottomless remnant of the
cruiser.
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