The next instant there was a loud explosion. The boat was shaken as a leaf in the wind, then with a convulsive shiver lay still in the water, like a creature stricken to death. A puff of smoke followed the noise and after that a tongue of flame shot high into the air and began licking its way hungrily along the seat.
Elinor found herself lying across Mrs. Paxton-Steele’s lap and the two boys were flat in the bottom of the boat. The old lady’s face had turned a deep purplish red and she sat looking at the flames with a strange, stupid expression.
Then up jumped Clarence, gave one look at his grandmother, another at the burning boat, and leaped into the water. With long, even strokes he made for the shore. As his grandmother watched him, a light came into her eyes and she tried to speak, but she could only mutter in a thick unnatural voice:
“Cow-ad-cowad-cowad!”
In the meantime Elinor was throwing water into Edward’s face. He had been stunned by the explosion but consciousness came back to him with the first dash of cold spray on his cheeks, and he sat up. Perhaps, in his dazed condition, he had forgotten that his grandmother and Elinor were in the burning boat and only saw the flames leaping high into the air. At any rate, without looking behind him, he jumped to the seat, stood for an instant poised on the side of the boat, and dived into the water as his cousin had done. When he rose again to the top and started to strike out toward shore, he glanced back over his shoulder. What he saw was his grandmother’s countenance, still that strange purplish color, and Elinor sitting beside her, holding her hand with a very haughty, proud expression on her face.
With three strokes he was at the side of the boat.
“Oh, what have I done?” he cried as he drew himself on board again.
It all happened very quickly, and Clarence was still hardly twenty yards from them, when Edward, kneeling in the bottom of the launch, drew out the fire extinguishers.
“It’s the gasoline that’s burning now,” he said in a quiet, steady voice. “If we can only put that out we’re all right.”
Wrenching the cap off the top of the torpedo shaped object, he rushed to the burning end of the boat and poured it over the flames. There were only two extinguishers, however, and the fire still continued to lick its way along the cushions after all the fluid had been used.