"Look now, all of you!" shouted Mr. Harms. "Biggest blast ever heard of around these parts."
They hardly breathed for the next few seconds, but Aunt Dorcas had her watch in her hand, and she was just saying, "Half a minute," when a little puff of smoke and dust shot up at the top of the limestone ridge. It was followed by other little puffs—nobody could tell how many, for they were all smothered in a sudden cloud that arose for many feet. The broad front of stone leaned suddenly out, as if it wished to look down and see what was going on in the old quarry below. Then it lost its balance at the same instant, and toppled swiftly over. A huge, dull, booming report went out from the cloud of smoke and dust on the summit, and that was followed by another great burst of thunderous, crashing sound, as the masses of solid stone came down upon the rocky level below.
It all went by before Aunt Dorcas could look at her watch, and she was just about to do so, when everybody else shouted "Oh!" and there was a loud splattering splash in the water between the two boats. The only "flying rock" sent out by the great blast had narrowly missed doing serious mischief. It had not been a very large one, but only one human being in either of those boats failed to dodge and lean the other way. That Mr. Harms did not dodge or lean accounted for the fact that his boat was only rocked to and fro a little, but for five minutes afterward Aunt Dorcas was compelled to scold those seven children for tipping their boat over, "without any kind of reason for it. The stone never came nigh you."
Still it was a good thing that the water was only two feet deep, and that the weather was nice and warm.
"B'ys," said Felix McCue, the moment he got his feet on the bottom, and stood up, dripping, and holding up Biddy, "did yez iver see a blast like that?"
"Oh, Bun!" screamed Lois, "are there any more stones coming? Was it the blast that upset us?"
"Mother! mother!" sputtered poor Katy Chittenden, "did it blow you over too?"
"Rube," said Bun, "Jeff isn't scared a mite. Are you? I ain't."
"Scared?—no," said Rube. "I wouldn't have missed it for anything, and all we've got's a ducking."
The big blacksmith did a good deal toward restoring a comfortable state of mind all around; but he could not make out that the other boat-load were in a comfortable state of body; and so they set out for home. Long before they got there, however, Katy said to Lois,