The men on the ice signaled that their lyddite train was laid and ready. They withdrew to a distance, one of them carrying the small battery, from which the slender connecting wires led to the sunken charges of explosive.
Picking up her boat, the Minnetonka, under reversed engines, backed away and stood ready for the dash to the basin. Twice the captain raised his megaphone to his lips to give the word, but each time he hesitated. Suddenly he dropped it and sprang into the wheelhouse. Immediately the ship lunged forward.
Keenly alive to these proceedings, Zenas Wright and Polaris, from their station near the forward davits, wondered at this new move.
"Now what has happened?" questioned the scientist. "One would think we were going into battle. See, they are manning the guns!"
Polaris glanced down the ship's rail and saw the eager-eyed gun crews tearing the coverings from their long-silent ordnance. Forth from their ports crept the grim muzzles of three of the Minnetonka's six-inch guns.
"Battle it is to be," said Polaris; "and yonder floats the enemy." He pointed to where a huge iceberg had broken from its mooring at the edge of the floe, and, momentarily gaining headway, was drifting in to bar the channel way.
The ship swung about sharply. One of her powerful searchlights played steadily on the face of the looming ice cliffs as it came on, its hundred towers and crags glittering and flashing in the brilliant ray, a mass of floating silver. A sharp word of command, and the three gun captains, bronzed and alert, bent to their levers with machinelike precision. The crackling of the floes and the grinding of the bergs were lost in the thunder of the guns.
At that point-blank range, the effect of the volley was terrific. Where the shells struck, the surface of the berg flew to pieces. The air in the radius of the searchlight was filled with a shower of scintillating splinters. Larger masses of ice slid from the face of the slow-moving mountain and plunged sullenly into the tossing waves. A cavern was made from which a thousand gleaming fissures shot into the darker body of the ice behind.
Working like beavers, the gunners reloaded and sent another crashing discharge into the floating wall at its water-line. As a small chunk of ice is parted by a few blows from an ice pick, so the repeated impact of the exploding shells shattered the berg and sundered it. Pitching and toppling, down came its lofty towers into the sea. Its giant menace crumbled into scores of insignificant blocks and a spreading bank of drift.
Again the Minnetonka backed and pointed her nose toward the floe, whither her searchlights were concentrated. Scoland reappeared on the bridge.