Pant’s hand was at the lever. The engine went still, but just at that instant a tremendous flash leaped up from the large tank at the rear of the fuselage.
Pant leaped high, then sank back with a shudder.
“Man! Man!” he gasped. “If that had been gasoline in that tank! If it had!”
His brow wrinkled. “I only hope it didn’t rip her wide open. Anyway, we climbed some. Can afford to glide.”
They were surrounded by a succession of vivid flashes of lightning. The plane was tipped to a rakish angle. Through a storm-washed window Johnny saw what lay below. The ocean, vast, mysterious, dark and terrible, appeared as a limitless open-hearth steel furnace filled with gleaming molten metal.
In the very midst of this was what appeared at first to be a mere splotch on the surface, but which in time resolved itself into the form of a steamship.
He gasped as he made out its form, “To think,” he muttered, “that any ship could live in this!”
Yet, as he thought of it, he knew that they had in years past. He had read authentic accounts of ships riding out such a storm.
Even as he watched he saw the water smooth out into what he knew to be the surface of a gigantic wave; saw, amid the flashes, the ship leap forward to meet it; saw her prow rest on air; saw her plunge; saw her buried beneath an avalanche of sea.
He shut his eyes, expecting never again to see that ship; yet, when he opened them, she was still there battling with the elements.