“Look!” cried some one, and pointed skyward.

I glanced up, and behold!  The sky was streaked with bright green trails.  They radiated from a point halfway between the western horizon and the zenith, and within the shining clouds of the meteor a streaming movement had begun, so that it seemed to be pouring both westwardly and back toward the east, with a crackling sound, as though the whole heaven was stippled over with phantom pistol-shots.  It seemed to me then as if the meteor was coming to help me, descending with those thousand pistols like a curtain to fend off this unmeaning foolishness of the sea.

“Boom!” went a gun on the big ironclad, and “boom!” and the guns of the pursuing cruisers flashed in reply.

To glance up at that streaky, stirring light scum of the sky made one’s head swim.  I stood for a moment dazed, and more than a little giddy.  I had a curious instant of purely speculative thought.  Suppose, after all, the fanatics were right, and the world was coming to an end!  What a score that would be for Parload!

Then it came into my head that all these things were happening to consecrate my revenge!  The war below, the heavens above, were the thunderous garment of my deed.  I heard Nettie’s voice cry out not fifty yards away, and my passion surged again.  I was to return to her amid these terrors bearing unanticipated death.  I was to possess her, with a bullet, amidst thunderings and fear.  At the thought I lifted up my voice to a shout that went unheard, and advanced now recklessly, revolver displayed in my hand.

It was fifty yards, forty yards, thirty yards—­the little group of people, still heedless of me, was larger and more important now, the green-shot sky and the fighting ships remoter.  Some one darted out from the bungalow, with an interrupted question, and stopped, suddenly aware of me.  It was Nettie, with some coquettish dark wrap about her, and the green glare shining on her sweet face and white throat.  I could see her expression, stricken with dismay and terror, at my advance, as though something had seized her by the heart and held her still—­a target for my shots.

“Boom!” came the ironclad’s gunshot like a command.  “Bang!” the bullet leapt from my hand.  Do you know, I did not want to shoot her then.  Indeed I did not want to shoot her then!  Bang! and I had fired again, still striding on, and—­each time it seemed I had missed.

She moved a step or so toward me, still staring, and then someone intervened, and near beside her I saw young Verrall.

A heavy stranger, the man in the hooded bath-gown, a fat, foreign-looking man, came out of nowhere like a shield before them.  He seemed a preposterous interruption.  His face was full of astonishment and terror.  He rushed across my path with arms extended and open hands, as one might try to stop a runaway horse.  He shouted some nonsense.  He seemed to want to dissuade me, as though dissuasion had anything to do with it now.