han one man
blenched.

The iron seared and crisped his flesh as his feet touched the torture.
He could feel the skin curl and harden. Gritting his teeth, he sped at
topmost speed of the house whither the aerials led.

The door was jammed!

Though the skin of his head seemed to tighten like a metal band, though
his lungs stabbed within him as he breathed, though the pain in his feet
was unendurable, Eric wrenched again and again at the handle, but the
door would not budge. He called, but there was no answer. Almost
delirious with baffled rage and excruciating suffering, the boy hurled
himself against the door, throwing his shoulder out of joint with the
power of the blow. The door fell inwards and he fell with it.

The heat that poured from the room was overpowering, a dull red glow in
the far corner of the floor showing that the flames were immediately
beneath. With a gasp and a clutch on his reeling senses, Eric saw
stretched out on the wireless table before him the figure of a man,
moaning slightly, but insensible. Unable to stand on the hot floor,
unable to escape from the room in which he had become trapped, he had
lain down on the instruments and his writhings near the key had sent
those tangled messages that the operator on the _Itasca_ had not been
able to understand.

Had it not been for the instinctive stimulus of his life-saving
training, Eric would have deemed that the man was beyond help and would
have sought safety himself. But his whirling senses held the knowledge
how often life lingers when it appears extinct. Scarcely conscious
himself of what he did, Eric grasped the unconscious man in his arms,
raced back across the terror of the red-hot deck, reached the
stern--how, he never knew--threw his moaning burden overboard and dived
in after him.

The shock as his parched and blistered body struck the cold sea water
steadied Eric for a second, just long enough to grasp the man he had
rescued, as the latter came floating to the surface. Then the pain of
the salt water upon his cruel burns smote him, and he felt himself give
way.

He tugged twice at the life-line as a signal that he was at his last
gasp, bidding them pull in. Then, gripping the last flicker of his
purposed energy on the one final aim--not to loose hold in the sea of
the man he had rescued from an intolerable death, the boy locked himself
to the sufferer in the "side carry" he once had known so well.

A sinking blackness came over hi