"Barnett's the man for her then," said Ives. "He's no economist when it comes to getting results. There she goes!"
Without any particular haste, as it seemed to the watchers, the hulk was shouldered out of the water, as by some hidden leviathan. Its outlines melted into a black, outshowering mist, and from that mist leaped a giant. Up, up, he towered, tossed whirling arms a hundred feet abranch, shivered, and dissolved into a widespread cataract. The water below was lashed into fury, in the midst of which a mighty death agony beat back the troubled waves of the trade wind. Only then did the muffled double boom of the explosion reach the ears of the spectators, presently to be followed by a whispering, swift-skimming wavelet that swept irresistibly across the bigger surges and lapped the ship's side, as for a message that the work was done.
Here and there in the sea a glint of silver, a patch of purple, or dull red, or a glistening apparition of black showed where the unintended victims of the explosion, the gay-hued open-sea fish of the warm waters, had succumbed to the force of the shock. Of the intended victim there was no sign save a few fragments of wood bobbing in a swirl of water.
When Barnett, the ordnance officer in charge of the destruction, returned to the ship, Carter complimented him.
"Good clean job, Barnett. She was a tough customer, too."
"What was she?" asked Ives.
"The Caroline Lemp, three-masted schooner. Anyone know about her?"
Ives turned to the ship's surgeon, Trendon, a grizzled and brief-spoken veteran, who had at his finger's tips all the lore of all the waters under the reign of the moon.
"What does the information bureau of the Seven Seas know about it?"
"Lost three years ago--spring of 1901--got into ice field off the tip of the Aleutians. Some of the crew froze. Others got ashore. Part of survivors accounted for. Others not. Say they've turned native. Don't know myself."