It was odd that they should have fired at the very moment I replied to him; yet such was the fact and such the coincidence. Scarcely had I uttered the words when a monstrous yellow flame leaped out over the bows of the Diamond Ship (which now had put about to chase us), and spreading itself abroad upon the waters left a heavy cloud of black smoke very baffling to their gunners. As for the shell, I know not to this day where it fell. We heard neither explosion nor splash; saw no spume or spray upon the hither sea, and were, not a man of us, a penny the worse for their endeavour. A second attempt achieved no better result. True, we detected the shell this time, for it fell plump into the sea, near the fifth part of a mile from our starboard quarter; but the wretched shooting, the long interval between the shots and the speed at which we travelled, inspired confidence anew, and so surely that my men began to cheer the gunners ironically, and even to flash a signal to them across the sea. “It’s as I thought, Larry,” said I, “they carry a gun and have no more idea how to use it than a lady in charge of a boarding school. The Jew has been living as near to a fool’s paradise as such a man is ever likely to get to paradise at all. I think we need waste no more coal. Let us lie to and take our chances. The risk is too small to think about.” “Yon man would never hit cocoanuts at a fair,” chimed in McShanus, who had come up. “What will ye be flying over the ocean for? Is it coal we have to steam to China and back? Sure, the docthor is wise entirely, and be hanged to them. We lie here as safe as a babe in a mother’s lap.” We laughed at his earnestness, but the order was rung down nevertheless, and presently the yacht lay rolling to the swell and we could hear the stokers drawing a furnace below. Who is justly to blame for the accident which followed I do not dare to tell myself. Sometimes I have charged myself with it and complained bitterly of the opinions I had ventured. I can only tell you that the yacht had scarcely been slowed down when the rogues’ ship fired at us again, and the shot, crossing our forward decks at an angle of some fifty-five degrees, struck a fine young seaman of the name of Holland and almost annihilated him before our very eyes. The tragedy had a greater significance because of the very mirth with which we had but a moment before regarded the Jew’s gunners and their performance. Death stood there upon the heels of laughter; a cry in the night was the answer to an honest man’s defiance and my own bravado. As for poor Holland, the shot took him about the middle and cut him absolutely in two. He could have suffered no pain—so instantaneously was he hurled into eternity. One moment I saw him standing at the bulwarks watching the distant searchlight; at the next, there remained but a dreadful something upon the deck from which men turned their eyes in horror and dare not so much as speak about.