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With scarcely any perceptible shock we struck her fair and square amidships, right in the wake of where I judged her boiler-room would be; there was a horrible crackling and rending of wood and iron as our stem sheared into and through her deck, a clamour of yells from the crew as they fought with each other in their mad haste to lower the boats, and the destroyer heeled over until she was almost on her beam-ends, a volleying succession of deep, heavy booms, accompanied by a tremendous outburst of steam, proclaimed that her boilers had burst, and at the same instant she seemed to crumple up and break completely in two, her bow-half sweeping along our port side, while her stern-half drove past to starboard, the crew, unable to get the boats afloat, leaping desperately overboard.
If you hear anything unusual, or the alarm goes off during the night, call me." "I will, Master Tom," and the old engineer, who had a living-room in a shack adjoining the boiler-room, locked the door after Tom left. The young inventor spent the early evening in attaching a new wire to his motor-cycle to replace the one he had purchased while on his disastrous trip.
The boiler-room was still dry, it seemed, for the incandescent lights burned without a flicker, even after the grimy oilers and stokers had come pouring up on deck. O'Neil climbed to the bridge. "Is this Halibut Bay?" he asked Captain Johnny. "It is. But we're piled up on the reef outside. She may hold fast I hope so, for there's deep water astern, and if she slips off she'll go down."
"It's the last hurt I'll be havin', Dan," he said before he fainted. "Don't speak the word, Mouse, an' you just after savin' me life!" Then the men in the fire-room saw a miracle: tears filled the big stoker's eyes. Neville had heard Larry's cry and rushed to the boiler-room. "For God's sake! what's happened now?" Dan pointed a shaking finger.
Our hero was himself wrenched from his position, and hurled against the bulkhead of the boiler-room; the masts went over the sides as if they had been pipe-stems, and the wire-ropes snapt like pack-thread.
I've forgotten to mention that there was some little difficulty with the eccentricities of the sub-basement floor. The wet clay ruined the first concrete poured, and little springs had a way of gushing up in the boiler-room. Also, one night a concrete shell for the elevator pit completely disappeared sank out of sight in the soft bottom.
Bomb-throwing from aloft upon the decks of battleships appeals vividly to the popular imagination, and the widespread destruction which may be caused by dropping such an agent down the funnel of a vessel into the boiler-room is a favourite theme among writers of fiction and artists.
The big front door was locked, but Steve was not to be denied and eventually gained entrance through a little door at the rear which led into the boiler-room and from there found their way into the main basement where were situated the big swimming tank, a commodious baseball cage and a bowling alley.
The ship was then rolling heavily enough to make walking difficult on the oily floor of the engine-room; in the boiler-room, lower by three feet, to stand steady even for a moment was impossible. Here, in this badly lighted quarter of the ship, ill humor hung in the air thicker than the coal-gas. Dan Sullivan, partly sobered, fired his boiler, showing ugly readiness for a fight.
From under scant brows he peered out on the world with near-sighted eyes; but whenever a smile broadened his wide mouth, his eyes would shine with a kindly light. Larry's defective sight had led to his banishment as a sailor from the decks. During a storm off Hatteras a stoker had fallen and died on the boiler-room plates.
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