"No water was thrown aboard us, and, near as I was to the explosion on the bridge, the rush of air could hardly be felt. Something that came tinkling down after striking the side of the charthouse, however--I picked it up when the show was over--turned out to be a thin fragment of the steel casing of the bomb. "A similar fragment, twisted into a peculiar shape, struck the chest of a man leaning over the rail in the waist of the ship, inflicting a slight flesh wound the exact shape of a ragged capital 'C.' "That any kind of a living man could really be trying to destroy a mere merchant ship in cold blood seemed to me so monstrous, so utterly impossible, that, until the second bomb was dropped, I was almost ready to believe that the first had been launched by accident. From then on we knew it was a fight for life. "The Hun took a broader swerve in bringing his machine round for the next charge, and, ten times quicker on his helm than we were, anticipated our next shift of course, and came darting down on an almost straight fore-and-aft line again. The sudden cloud of our foreblown smoke--there was a following wind on the 'leg' they had put her on at the moment--which engulfed him at the instant his third bomb was released was the one thing in the world that could have made him miss so easy a 'sitter.' The quick 'side-flip' the sharply-banked 'plane gave to the dropped missile threw it wide by twice the distance the second had missed us. Though the detonation rang sharp and clear, and though a vicious spout of foam shot up, I could note no effect of the thing whatever on the ship. Whether that was his last bomb or not we could never be quite sure. At any rate, it was the last he tried to drop upon us, or upon any other ship for that matter. "Just why he returned to the attack with his machine-gun we could only guess. It may have been, as is probable, that he was at the end of the small supply of bombs left from the raid he was doubtless returning from. "Again, however, it is just possible that the fact that the fire was being got under control on the poop impelled him to adopt an attack calculated to drive the plucky chaps who were fighting it to cover. "Anyhow, flying just high enough to clear the tops of the masts, he came swooping back, and it was upon the men trying to put out the fire--now confined to the wreckage--of the deckhouse--that he seemed to concentrate his attack. Two or three of these I saw fall under the rain of bullets, and among them was our freight clerk, who had also been knocked down by the explosion of the first bomb, but who, being hardly stunned by the shock, was soon on his feet again and leading the fire-fighters.