A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the
Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a
great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the
_Thunder Child_ sounded through the reek, going off one after the
other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer,
ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a
smack to matchwood.
But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian s
collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the
crowding passengers on the steamer s stern shouted together. And then
they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove
something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts,
its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.
She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her
engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was
within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with
a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped
upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and
in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the
impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing of
cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam
hid everything again.
Two! yelled the captain.
Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with
frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the
crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.
The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third
Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was
paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at last
the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened,
and nothing of the _Thunder Child_ could be made out, nor could the
third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite
close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.
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