Nor was this all. The inexorable stern of the _Minnie Williams_ followed after, raising the roof of the Higgins place with the skillful care of an epicure taking the cover off his favorite dish. The roof yielded with only a gentle rippling motion, and the ship's lifeboat, which hung from davits aft, scraped the remains of supper off the supper table with her keel. Zinie Shadd, returning late from a lodge meeting which had wound up with a little supper in the banquet hall, felt a queer stir through his members to see the Higgins place alter its usually placid countenance, falter, turn half round, and get down on its knees with an apparently disastrous collapse of its four walls and of everything within them. The short wide windows narrowed and lengthened with an effect of bodily agony as the ribs of the place were snapped off short all round the eaves. "God help them poor creatures inside!" he was moved to utter out of the goodness of his heart. "She went in jest as easy," he recounted later to one of his cronies. "It warn't no more exertion for her than 't would be to you to stick your finger through a cream puff." "How come it they 'scaped with a whole skin?" "I don't see for the life of me. Elmer says himself it's just another case of where it's _for_ a man to live, and if it ain't for him to he won't, and if it's for him to be will, and that's about all there is to it." Elmer's exact phrase has been that he guessed nothing coming from the sea side would ever cheat the gallows. Pearl Higgins told a friend of hers that the one thing that came into her mind as she lay there was that the place had been torpedoed. "I knew what it was just as well as I wanted to," she said. She had known all along that if any place would get it it would be the Higgins place, on account of its exposed position, right in line with anything that showed up at the mouth of the harbor. Of course if she had stopped to think she would have known that a torpedo didn't come through a house at the snail's pace the stove was moving at when it looked through at her. "But my land, at a time like that what is a body to think?" she inquired. Of course as soon as she could get her wits together she could see that it was her own stove, and nothing to be afraid of in itself if only she knew what was animating it. There was the rub. The truth is, the performance of the stove, at that hour of the night, too, was so wholly out of the ordinary that she and Elmer had not so much as stirred out of their tracks for the fraction of a second it took the thing to come clear into the room. Pearl said later that she thought she was seeing things. "Scared? I was petrified! I couldn't stir hand or foot," she told her friend. "You talk about your flabbergasted women! I never had such a feeling come over me before."