"The _Wyvern_ has hit a mine!" roared the Dutch captain. "I'm going to get out of this _now_!" Jamison's youthful face was marble; he swayed slightly where he stood. The next instant he was over the side like a cat, and Guild heard him hailing his boat in an agonized voice which broke with a dry, boyish sob. From everywhere out of the blackness searchlights stretched out tremulous phantom arms toward the _Wyvern_, and their slender white beams crossed and recrossed each other, focussing on the stricken warship, which was already down by the stern, her after deck awash, and that infernal red glow surrounding her like the glow of hell around a soul in torment. Passengers, seamen, stewards crowded and crushed him to the rail, shouting, struggling, crying out in terror or in pity. Guild caught an officer by his gold sleeve. "We ought to stand by her," he said mechanically. "Her magazine is afire!" "There are boats a-plenty to look after her," returned the officer; "the British destroyers are all around her like chicks about a dying hen. She's their parent ship; and there go their boats, pulling hell for sweeps! God! If it was a mine, I wish we were at Amsterdam, I do!" The steamer was already under way; electric signals sparkled from her; signals were sparkling everywhere in the darkness around them. And all the while the cruiser with her mortal wound, enveloped in her red aura, agonized there in the horrible sombre radiance of her own burning vitals. Far away in the black void a ship began to fire star-shells. As the awed throng on the moving liner's decks gazed out across the night, the doomed cruiser split slowly amidships, visibly, showing the vivid crack of her scarlet, jagged wound. For a second or two she fairly vomited hell-fire; lay there spouting it out in great crimson gouts; then she crashed skyward into incandescent fragments like a single gigantic bomb, and thunderous blackness blotted out sea and sky once more. CHAPTER X FORCE He knocked sharply at the stateroom door and called, "Karen! It is I! Open!" She flung open the door, satchel in hand, and he entered, closed the door, relocked it, and dropped down on the lounge, staring at space. "Kervyn! What is it?" she asked faintly, one hand against her breast. "It is all right," he said--"as far as we are concerned--for the present, anyway. God! I can't realize it--I can't get over it----" "What, Kervyn?" she faltered, kneeling on the lounge beside the half dazed man. "What happened? Why are you so ghastly pale? Are we really quite safe? Or are you trying to make it easier for me----" "No; you and I are safe enough for the moment," he said. "But men are dying out yonder. The sea is full of dead men, Karen. And--I saw it all." "I heard guns. What has happened?"