Officers were galloping about yelling orders; over in the dust where the bomb had struck, a man was sawing furiously away at the throats of the oxen (there were seven of them, and there would be plenty of beef in camp that night at any rate); there was a dead horse, two badly wounded men and a hundred feet away a man lying on his face, hatless, just as he had been blown there:  dead, or as good as dead.  It appeared that two fliers had come from opposite directions and most of the crowd had seen but the one, while the other dropped the bomb.  It had struck just outside the busiest part of the camp, aimed very likely at the stores piled there.  It had made a hole only five or six feet wide and two or three feet deep, but it had blown everything in the neighborhood out from it, as the captain had said.  Holes you could put your fist in were torn in the flanks of the oxen by flying stones and chunks of metal, and the tires of some of the wagons, sixty or seventy feet away, had been cut through like wax.

The ground was cleared, the men returned to work, and we even went in swimming, but at every unexpected noise one looked upward, and when about five o’clock the crowd scattered again, I will confess that I watched that little speck buzzing nearer, on a line that would bring him straight overhead, with an interest considerably less casual than any I had bestowed on these birds before.  There we were, confined in our little amphitheatre; there was that diabolical bird peering down at us, and in another minute, somewhere in that space, would come that earth-shaking explosion—­a mingling of crash and vohou’!  There was no escaping it, no dodging it, nothing to get under but empty air.

I had decided that the beach, about a hundred yards away from the wharfs, was the safest place and hurried there; but the speck overhead, as if anticipating me, seemed to be aiming for the precise spot.  It is difficult under such circumstances to sit tight, reasoning calmly that, after all, the chances of the bomb’s not landing exactly there are a good many to one—­you demand at least the ostrich-like satisfaction of having something overhead.  So I scurried over to the left to get out from under what seemed his line of flight, when what should he do but begin to turn!

This was really rubbing it in a bit.  To fly across as he had that morning was one thing, but to pen one up in a nice little pocket in the hills, and then on a vertical radius of three or four thousand feet, to circle round over one’s head—­anything yet devised by the human nightmare was crude and immature to this.  But was it overhead?  If behind, and travelling at fifty or sixty miles an hour, the bomb would carry forward—­just enough probably to bring it over; and if apparently over, still the bomb would have been several seconds in falling—­it might be right on top of us now!  Should we run backward or forward:  Here was a place, in between some grain-bags.  But the grain-bags were open toward the wharf, and the wharf was what he was aiming at, and a plank blown through you—­No, the trench was the thing, but—­Quick, he is overhead!