of perils yet to come.

They had gone out from a ship filled with a monstrous clangour and
confusion, they were returning to a tomblike hulk, a lonely mass in
which echoes would abound, a thing of sighs and silences, the corpse of
a mammoth that had throbbed yesterday,--but never more.

Up in the curving triangle of the forward deck were two long,
canvas-covered rows. The dead! Forty-six twisted, silent forms lying
side by side, some calm in death, others charred and mutilated beyond
all possibility of identification. Every man in the engine-room at
the time of the explosion was now a mangled, unrecognizable thing.
Engineers, electricians, stokers,--all of them wiped out in the flash of
an eye,--burnt, boiled, shattered. Half a dozen women, as many children,
lay with the silent men.

The injured had been placed in staterooms on the promenade deck,
regardless of previous occupancy or subsequent claim. There lay the
score and a half of seriously injured, and there toiled the ship's
surgeon and his volunteer helpers. Sailor and merchant, worker and
idler, scholar and dolt, steerage and first cabin, wealth and poverty,
shared alike in the disposition of quarters and shared alike in
attention. There was no discrimination. One life was as good as another
to the doctor and his men, the poor man's moan as full of suffering as
that of the rich man, the wail of the steerage woman as piteous as that
of her sister above.

Captain Trigger was one of the injured. He swore a great deal when the
doctor ordered him to bed. Ribs and a broken arm? Why the devil should
he be put to bed for something a schoolboy would laugh at? Mr. Shannon
and two of the younger officers were killed by the explosion that
wrecked the bridge and chart house. Chief Engineer Gray died in the
engine-room. Cruise was blown to pieces in the wireless house. His
assistant, the cripple with the charmed life, was dead.

A few seconds before the first explosion took place he blew out his
brains with a big navy revolver. The last seen of Cruise was when he
appeared in the door of his station, an expression of mingled rage and
alarm on his face. Pointing frantically at the figure of his assistant
as it shot down the steps and across the deck, he shouted:

"Get that man! Get him! For God's sake, get him!"

It all happened in a few seconds of time. The shrill laugh of
the fleeing assistant, the report of the revolver, an instant of
stupefaction,--and then the dull