n went past them and down the steps to the
car deck. Half-way down, the priest whom he had noticed among the
passengers stood staring aft, a tense, black figure; beside him other
passengers were clinging to the handrail and staring down in awestruck
fascination. The lowest steps had been crushed back and half up-torn;
some monstrous, inanimate thing was battering about below; but the
space at the foot of the steps was clear at that moment. Alan leaped
over the ruin of the steps and down upon the car deck.

A giant iron casting six feet high and yards across and tons in weight,
tumbled and ground before him; it was this which had swept away the
steps; he had seen it, with two others like it, upon a flat car which
had been shunted upon one of the tracks on the starboard side of the
ferry, one of the tracks on his left now as he faced the stern. He
leaped upon and over the great casting, which turned and spun with the
motion of the ship as he vaulted it. The car deck was a pitching,
swaying slope; the cars nearest him were still upon their tracks, but
they tilted and swayed uglily from side to side; the jacks were gone
from under them; the next cars already were hurled from the rails,
their wheels screaming on the steel deck, clanging and thudding
together in their couplings.

Alan ran aft between them. All the crew who could be called from deck
and engine room and firehold were struggling at the fantail, under the
direction of the captain, to throw off the cars. The mate was working
as one of the men, and with him was Benjamin Corvet. The crew already
must have loosened and thrown over the stern three cars from the two
tracks on the port side; for there was a space vacant; and as the train
charged into that space and the men threw themselves upon it, Alan
leaped with them.

The leading car--a box car, heavily laden--swayed and shrieked with the
pitching of the ship. Corvet sprang between it and the car coupled
behind; he drew out the pin from the coupling, and the men with
pinch-bars attacked the car to isolate it and force it aft along the
track. It moved slowly at first; then leaped its length; sharply with
the lift of the deck, it stopped, toppled toward the men who, yelling
to one another, scrambled away. The hundred-ton mass swung from side
to side; the ship dropped swiftly to starboard, and the stern went
down; the car charged, and its aftermost wheels left the deck; it swung
about, slewed, and jammed