Almost as one with Elaine's small detonation, the mighty jar, the air-confounding concussion, the smothered boom, and the dizzying tremor that swayed the hill, shook down the girl's bewildered senses. She saw the red leap from the cannon's mouth--and saw three men, surprised to inaction on the deadly angle of the trail--then down she went, her mind convinced she had rended the island asunder. Sounds of colossal destruction stormed through the air for a time that seemed to have no end. The roar of a cataract of broken stone, confusedly toppling from estates erected by the ages, was lost in a tumult of other sounds where the headland seemed to fill the sea. Dust of the rock and smoke of the rock ascended with fumes of the powder. Tidal disturbances splashed and seethed where the sea, having split to receive those tons of chaos, surged back with augmented violence at this displacement of its waters. The cave had been blotted from existence! Its walls and its ceiling had crashed from their several places. to leave only an ugly scar. Whole towers of rocks, cleaved from the hill's main mass in sudden violence, had hung in disordered ruin against the quaking air for a second, then rioted downward on the Dyak boat to plunge it, rent and shivered, to the bottom. Not a man of that murderous group below had survived the climax of that second. The place that had once been a treasure tomb, with a wailing "spirit" at its portals, was at last a very tomb indeed; but nevermore would its tidal wail arise on the air to render the cavern sacred. Like a veritable spirit of underground destruction, Grenville emerged from the passage, unaware of all he had done. His thought was only of Elaine. He called, as he climbed to the terrace, but no glad little cry made response. Then, abruptly, he saw her prostrate figure on the rocks--and beyond her two men, with one limberly inert, limping blindly down the trail. To dart to his store, snatch the last of his bombs, and pursue these three who had threatened Elaine was the first wild impulse of his being. Just one such blow, to follow up his victory, and perhaps they should need no more! But he ran instead to the helpless figure near the cannon. He knew what she had done. He took her up swiftly, calling on her name, and carried her back to the former cave, where a rosy light from the risen sun made it seem like a haven of promise. CHAPTER XLIV A LOTUS BLOSSOM It was still very early in the morning when Grenville finally discovered, afar out northward on the sea, two Dyak boats making swiftly away from the island. He feared for a moment, when the sails were first discerned, they were new craft about to arrive. He could not have known that his mines sunk the third of the boats formerly at anchor in the inlet, and was in no way enabled to determine how many of the enemy had perished at the cave.