Presently Lieutenant Everson, his repair work well under way, came up from below and joined the others. Dr. Marsey might have been with them also, but the kindly physician delayed below to attend one of the engineers who lay ill of a fever. Before he had finished his ministrations, the stroke fell which was so strangely to alter the life course of every one of that party, and the good doctor was too late to be numbered among them.
Almost on the heels of Everson the red-haired stranger ascended the companionway. With his armor on as usual, but dangling his helmet and his mask from his hand, he clanked across the deck, all unheedful of the anathemas that the sailors mouthed as he stalked past them.
From the port in his cabin he, too, had seen the new land that lay ahead. He strode by the group on the forward deck, but his eyes were not for them. Ever watchful, Zenas Wright noted that the mien of the stranger was curiously excited. His blue eyes gleamed. His lips were parted. Something seemed deeply to concern him. He stood at the rail and studied the looming coastline long and searchingly. In his face was the rapt expression of the man who greets again a well-loved friend after an absence of many days. From the shore he turned his eyes to the sea and scrutinized it keenly.
Zenas Wright, watching, started. What was the man about? Was he signaling? And whom? The explorer took a hasty step toward the rail to investigate.
Beneath his feet he felt the deck of the cruiser heave like the breast of an unquiet sleeper. A terrific roar burst from the bowels of the ship, and she quivered in every plate of steel and oaken beam.
"The magazine!" cried Everson. The commander dashed for the companionway, but he never reached it.
Amidships the decks heaved up and opened in a yawning wound that rent the cruiser almost from rail to rail. Through the gap shot skyward an immense column of smoke, laced with spurts of flame, and spread fanwise many feet in the air. With it there ascended a mass of débris torn from the vitals of the ship. For yards around the waves splashed to the fall of the splintered wreckage. The swaying decks were littered with it. And some of the fragments were of steel and iron that clanged as they fell, and others were horrible shreds of men, and made no clangor.
Paralyzed in his tracks, his eyes distended, his very flesh stirring from his bones at the horror of it, Everson faced the wraith of ruin that arose in his path. A new manifestation tore speech from his lips.
"Look!" he shouted aloud in a strained and unnatural voice. "My God, look! The color!"
In the heart and center of the standing column of smoke, seen faintly at first and then in blazing brilliance, towered a mighty pillar of light. But it was not like any light that any of those who gazed upon it had ever known. For it was neither of red nor white, nor yet of violet, yellow, or green, or any other color or hue of the solar spectrum. Radiant, scintillant, indescribably beautiful, it thrust up through the murk of disaster steadily and cruelly as the flaming sword of an unkind fate. It was this that had pierced the ship and exploded the magazine.