t a good deal
farther than he had originally intended. He knew that he was in a
position of some danger, and, besides being himself additionally on the
alert, he posted an extra look-out, with orders to keep his eyes wide
open for the first signs of light or loom of moving ship upon that
black, rushing waste of water.

T.B. 42 was behaving splendidly, and Murray was just congratulating
himself that, in spite of the violence of the wind, his little craft was
fighting her way to her destination at a good honest twelve knots an
hour, when, with a shriek like that of a thousand warlocks, the wind and
sleet whirled down in a burst of vicious fury that struck the boat like
a solid wall, rendering it a matter of physical impossibility for any
human being to face it until after its first violence was exhausted.

It was during those few fateful moments that the catastrophe occurred.
As the gust veered away astern, and the breathless, half-frozen seamen
on deck were again able to direct their eyes ahead, there came a wild
cry from the look-out forward of: "Port your helm, sir; port your helm!"
followed, before Murray could spring to the assistance of the
quartermaster at the wheel, by a splintering crash, the rending sound of
steel rasping through steel. Then the little craft heeled over to
starboard, until Murray felt himself sliding bodily down the steeply
inclined deck towards the sea; while above, right over his head, as it
seemed, he could dimly perceive the outline of a great, towering metal
stem that still surged and sawed onward and over Number 42, relentless
as fate itself.

A second later, and the catastrophe was complete. The colliding steamer
lifted with the 'scend of the waves and crashed down yet again upon the
hapless torpedo-boat, and young Frobisher found himself in the raging
sea, clinging instinctively to something--he knew not what--that had
come away in his hands as he flung them out wildly to prevent himself
from sliding off the deck. As his head appeared above the brine after
the plunge, he heard certain dreadful cries which he never forgot as
long as he lived. They were the death shrieks of his unhappy crew,
imprisoned below among the bursting steam-pipes and boilers, the cascade
of white-hot coals from the furnaces, and the crumpling wreckage of
machinery and torn plates; and he knew that his trim little ship and his
gallant comrades were gone from him for ever.

As it happened, those on the look