“Good-bye, old chaps,” Bob yelled mockingly, just as the Zeppelin to the left let fire a broadside with every one of her seven cannon. The “kick” of the discharge caused her to careen backward amid clouds of powder smoke.
Shells droned gruesomely past the speeding Flyer—overhead, beneath, on both sides.
A rending thud that hurled the airship on her beam ends ... the splintering crash of wood and metal ... frenzied cries for help from Buck down in the engine room. A perceptible “missing” of the engines and an alarming tilt to one side.
The Ocean Flyer had been hit!
CHAPTER XXX
THE MOST TERRIBLE ACCIDENT OF ALL
“What in goodness’ name is the matter down there? Where did that shell strike us?” shouted Ned, anxiously, through the speaking tube, while both Alan and Bob tumbled downstairs in answer to Buck’s frantic appeal from the engine room.
“Put on every ounce of pressure you can,” they signalled up to the boy in the pilot room presently. He did so, and for a bit the Flyer showed a spurt of her old speed, leaving the Zeppelin a dwindling speck in the distance. Within twenty minutes, however, despite the application of every power appliance in the equipment, the speed again began to diminish until the airship was not making more than fifteen miles an hour.
As the velocity gradually decreased, the huge wing-like exterior planes automatically unfolded, but, to the horror of the boys, no sooner had they attained full expansion than the whole lateral series on the right side of the hull collapsed into mere wreckage, dragging the Flyer violently over in that direction and hurling the young aeronauts off their feet.
The bursting shell had indeed done effective damage. It had struck the armored magnalium hull just about amidships, ploughed its way through the metal, leaving a great jagged hole in the twisted sheets of steel, and had exploded just outside the engine room, one partition of which was demolished with various alarming damage to the machinery. At the same time, some flying pieces of the exploding shell must have struck the exterior plane and propulsion mechanism, snapping the supports and rendering the entire outside wings wholly useless.