"My God, Tyler, can't you see what's taking place?" yelled Hat Tyler.
Tyler unquestionably could. He had set a cold corn-cob pipe between his teeth; he answered nothing, but his fascinated saucer eyes were fixed on the precise spot where as it seemed the boom was destined to be planted. This was at a place about six feet below the square of soapstone with a hole in it, through which the stovepipe passed. He was not disappointed. The boom in fact exerted its whole pressure against the body of the stove itself, with the result which we have seen. The stove made its way across the kitchen and appeared in the bedroom at the moment when Elmer had made up his lips to blow the flame.
Nor was this all. The inexorable stern of the Minnie Williams followed after, raising the roof of the Higgins place with the skillful care of an epicure taking the cover off his favorite dish. The roof yielded with only a gentle rippling motion, and the ship's lifeboat, which hung from davits aft, scraped the remains of supper off the supper table with her keel.
Zinie Shadd, returning late from a lodge meeting which had wound up with a little supper in the banquet hall, felt a queer stir through his members to see the Higgins place alter its usually placid countenance, falter, turn half round, and get down on its knees with an apparently disastrous collapse of its four walls and of everything within them. The short wide windows narrowed and lengthened with an effect of bodily agony as the ribs of the place were snapped off short all round the eaves.
"God help them poor creatures inside!" he was moved to utter out of the goodness of his heart. "She went in jest as easy," he recounted later to one of his cronies. "It warn't no more exertion for her than 't would be to you to stick your finger through a cream puff."
"How come it they 'scaped with a whole skin?"
"I don't see for the life of me. Elmer says himself it's just another case of where it's for a man to live, and if it ain't for him to he won't, and if it's for him to be will, and that's about all there is to it."
Elmer's exact phrase has been that he guessed nothing coming from the sea side would ever cheat the gallows.
Pearl Higgins told a friend of hers that the one thing that came into her mind as she lay there was that the place had been torpedoed.
"I knew what it was just as well as I wanted to," she said. She had known all along that if any place would get it it would be the Higgins place, on account of its exposed position, right in line with anything that showed up at the mouth of the harbor. Of course if she had stopped to think she would have known that a torpedo didn't come through a house at the snail's pace the stove was moving at when it looked through at her.