Suddenly the jackies set up a roar.
From the turret door there staggered a black, weird figure; its clothes hung in shreds and blood streamed from a dozen cuts and bruises. In its arms this reeling figure carried another scarecrow-like form, the latter half-naked, like its bearer.
The first figure turned toward the dumfounded group of officers with a ghastly attempt at a smile on its blackened face, and then pitched forward with its burden.
Captain Dunham himself caught Ned Strong as he fell. Mr. Scott, the executive officer, as swift to act as his commander, had at the same instant seized hold of the limp form of Lieutenant Timmons, which the Dreadnought Boy had dragged from the jaws of death.
The doctor, a strange, soft light on his face, was still bending over his so strangely restored patients, when another roar came from the jackies. They seized each other and capered about like lunatics, and not an officer checked them. Temporarily the Manhattan housed a mob of cheering, yelling maniacs.
For through the turret door there now emerged a second figure, but this one bore a head of fiery red above his sooty countenance.
It was Herc, and with him he dragged out the collapsed figure of the inventor.
The Dreadnought Boys had beaten the flareback at its own grisly game.
From the scorched lips of Lieutenant Timmons, who, besides a few burns and the effects of the severe shock, had, like the others, miraculously escaped injury, the captain that evening heard the whole story.
The flareback had come like a bolt from the blue while the gun crew, still cheering Jim Cooper's second hit, were reloading.