LITMIR.BIZ

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and exhaust, which were ripping the sky with diapasons of appeal.

      A rocket screeched aloft, and by its glare the doctor saw a slashing, clawing frenzy at the rail—saw the davits rock and shudder as the boats were wrenched outboard and the horde swarmed them, bursting all constraint.

      “No chance for us there—with your uncle.” Willard made her understand. “They’d crush him in a second. We’ll have to wait.”

      He saw her nod. “Talk about women being cowards!” flashed the thought through his mind.

      Drawing her back into the shelter of a bulk, he put the cripple gently down. The old man, stunned, said nothing, but crouched low, with blinking eyes. Willard and the girl leaned up against the wall, bracing their feet upon the deck, which every moment settled at a steeper pitch.

      Now they could look down on the hideous fight. They saw the captain’s huge frame overtopping all, dominant as his voice that blared out in command. They caught a gleam of pistol steel in his hand—a spike of flame—and someone pitched across the rail.

      “Bairns and th’ weemen fairrst!” his brave old sea cry rang. Then, like lightning, a sudden something smote the captain’s head, and he was seen no more. Hell burst its bounds; panic reaped its certain due.

      III.

      “Don’t look! You mustn’t!” Willard cried, shielding from her the tragedy of the long-boat as a tackle jammed and spilled two-score clutching, yelling creatures in the swirl. The boat flailed—a giant pendulum—and shaking loose the few that clung to thwarts or gunwales, splintered to fragments on the liner’s iron skin.

      An instant, black, fighting things were sown broadcast upon the roaring sea—things that shrieked, went down bubbling, rose, then, with crisped fingers, disappeared forever.

      “There’s been an accident—don’t look!”

      “I’m not afraid,” he heard her answer, but the hand that grasped his arm trembled. He loved her for the very fear she knew so well to hold in leash.

      A shudder ran through the wreck—a roar that boomed above the sirens’ bellowing—then, where the bows had been, gaped a vast black emptiness, with death-screams choked by upswirling brine. A third of the whole ship had broken free and, with its fearful toll, had foundered like a plummet.

      The Sutherland, eased by this loss, ground back upon the reef more firmly than before, and settled at a safer pitch, but her survivors deemed their end was now upon them, and fought each other starkly at the boats. All but one of the green flares had burned away, and by this ghastly dim virescence Willard saw men trampled and women hurled aside.

      “Safer aboard than anywhere with madmen!” he cried in the girl’s ear. “Don’t move! Stay where you are!”

      He drove down into the wolf-pack—his duty called him there—and smote with hard fists that came back reddened from his blows, striving to scatter the crazed brutes. But in the dark and tumult he could compass nothing. A blow clipped his temple; he felt the blood run hot, but he only dashed it from his eyes and struck the harder, striving to wedge through and split the mob.

      He saw foul knife-play, heard the first mate grunt and double up, got sights of hands that strangled and glimpsed blind primitive anarchy as a second boat was launched.

      It foundered straightway, from gross overcrowding. Amid the drowning wretches, breaking off their hand-grasps, a third boat was got away with only five oars, her gunwales shipping water at each sea. Then went the life-raft. He helped fling it overboard, aided some to jump in safety, and vainly tried to hold back others who leaped out at random—who missed and sank, with never a human hand held out to them for salvage.

      “Better stay here! Safer on the ship!” he shouted to the lessening fugitives, but no one heeded him. When at last they all were gone—some to death, some to uncertain struggles with the night and the sea—when all had disappeared save a few limp figures rolling in the scuppers, he climbed back, bleeding, up the slippery deck to Ethel.

      He found her in the bulkhead corner, kneeling in the gloom over a prostrate something that neither stirred nor spoke.

      “What! Can I help?” he cried.

      She shook her head, raising her hand silently, and he forbore. He understood. The old man’s heart had lashed itself to bursting with the panic and the stress. Now, out of all the throng, only one woman and one man were left.

      The doctor’s wisdom kept his lips from platitudes. He turned, and left Ethel to herself a moment, gazing off landward. The ship was utterly dark now, for the last flare had burned to ash, the dynamos had stopped, and all the lights were dead. The steam-pipes’ roar had dwindled to a sibilant murmur, drowned by the lash and crumble of the surges on the reef. Under the great passionless stars the wreck lay spent and weary, crushed to death, unmoved by even the heaviest seas.

      Quite suddenly the doctor noticed a little speck of light far in the gloom, then another—many specks, that lay where he half guessed the shore must be. Puzzled, he knit his brows.

      “It can’t be that any have reached land yet. Those can’t be fires. Never knew campfires to crawl that way.”

      Dully he watched the sparks creep, come together, then separate. They almost seemed to be advancing toward the ship.

      Then the truth hit him, and he stumbled back.

      “Merciful Heaven! the Guinea blacks—the wreckers of Bis­sa­gos!”

      IV.

      He stooped to Ethel tenderly. “Listen,” said he. “We must get away from here. It’s death to stay!”

      She clung to him. He drew her up—away. She was only a blur in the night, but intuition told him that her face was wet with tears.

      “Death?” she asked. “The wreck won’t last till morning?”

      “It’s not that. There’s something—something else. You’d better know at once. See there—off there to shoreward?”

      “Those lights, you mean?”

      “Lights, yes. They’re torches—in canoes. They’re coming. They mustn’t find us here, or—”

      “I understand. But can we go, and leave the—the—”

      “Nobody must be left. There couldn’t be a finer burial than the sea! I’ll take you into the saloon, then come back here and do what must be done.”

      She understood, and yielded nobly. He led her off along the steep deck, after a silent moment by her uncle’s body. He brought her safely to the main saloon, struck a match and found his bearings.

      “All you need do is sit quite still in here. I won’t be gone five minutes.” Then he left her.

      The work was harder than he had expected, for there was a lantern to be found and lighted, and—there were other difficulties. After a while the task was done.

      When he came back to her, his pockets crammed with provisions and cartridges, a bandolier of canvas supporting revolvers and two magazine-rifles, she greeted him with a pale, thin smile. By the lantern light that glimmered sickly through the mocking splendor of the place, he saw her eyes brimming with tears, but she was calm and full of courage.

      “We’ve got to find and launch a boat, or something, right away.”

      “Come, then, let’s be about it,” she replied. “There can’t be many boats left, can there?”

      “Hardly two or three. The port-side’s stripped. We’ll soon find out.”

      He helped her up across the saloon floor, which slanted like a house roof, and they issued out upon the larboard side. The wind could not strike here; and the waves, too, thirty-odd feet below, broke with less furious lashings.

      Willard held the lantern high with his right hand. His left clutched the rail. Ethel steadied herself on him. Thus they

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