A hidden battery roared and--pop!--a little puff of cotton floated in the sky under the approaching flier. Another and another--all the nervous little batteries in the hills round about were coming to our rescue. The bird-man, safely above them, drew on without flinching. We had looked up at aeroplanes many times before and watched the pretty chase of the shrapnel, and we leaned out from under the awning to keep the thing in view. "Look," I said to Suydam; "she's coming right over us!" And then, all at once, there was a crash, a concussion that hit the ear like a blow, a geyser of smoke and dust and stones out on the flat in front of us. Through the smoke I saw a horse with its pack undone and flopping under its belly, trotting round with the wild aimlessness of horses in the bull-ring after they have been gored. Men were running, and, in a tangle of wagons, half a dozen oxen, on the ground, were giving a few spasmodic kicks. Men streaked up from the engine-room and across the wharf--after all, the wharf would be the thing he'd try for--and I found myself out on the flat with them just as there came another crash, but this time over by the Barbarossa across the bay. Black smoke was pouring from the Turkish cruiser as she got under way, and, with the shrapnel puffs chasing hopelessly after, the flier swung to the southward and out of right. Officers were galloping about yelling orders; over in the dust where the bomb had struck, a man was sawing furiously away at the throats of the oxen (there were seven of them, and there would be plenty of beef in camp that night at any rate); there was a dead horse, two badly wounded men and a hundred feet away a man lying on his face, hatless, just as he had been blown there: dead, or as good as dead. It appeared that two fliers had come from opposite directions and most of the crowd had seen but the one, while the other dropped the bomb. It had struck just outside the busiest part of the camp, aimed very likely at the stores piled there. It had made a hole only five or six feet wide and two or three feet deep, but it had blown everything in the neighborhood out from it, as the captain had said. Holes you could put your fist in were torn in the flanks of the oxen by flying stones and chunks of metal, and the tires of some of the wagons, sixty or seventy feet away, had been cut through like wax.