he fell over, had caught, in succession, every pair of davits to
starboard, bending and wrenching them, smashing boats, and snapping
tackles and gripes, until, as the ship cleared herself, it capped the
pile of wreckage strewing the ice in front of, and around it, with the
end and broken stanchions of the bridge. And in this shattered, box-like
structure, dazed by the sweeping fall through an arc of seventy-foot
radius, crouched Rowland, bleeding from a cut in his head, and still
holding to his breast the little girl--now too frightened to cry.

By an effort of will, he aroused himself and looked. To his eyesight,
twisted and fixed to a shorter focus by the drug he had taken, the
steamship was little more than a blotch on the moon-whitened fog; yet he
thought he could see men clambering and working on the upper davits, and
the nearest boat--No. 24--seemed to be swinging by the tackles. Then the
fog shut her out, though her position was still indicated by the roaring
of steam from her iron lungs. This ceased in time, leaving behind it the
horrid humming sound and whistling of air; and when this too was
suddenly hushed, and the ensuing silence broken by dull, booming
reports--as from bursting compartments--Rowland knew that the holocaust
was complete; that the invincible _Titan_, with nearly all of her
people, unable to climb vertical floors and ceilings, was beneath the
surface of the sea.

Mechanically, his benumbed faculties had received and recorded the
impressions of the last few moments; he could not comprehend, to the
full, the horror of it all. Yet his mind was keenly alive to the peril
of the woman whose appealing voice he had heard and recognized--the
woman of his dream, and the mother of the child in his arms. He hastily
examined the wreckage. Not a boat was intact. Creeping down to the
water's edge, he hailed, with all the power of his weak voice, to
possible, but invisible boats beyond the fog--calling on them to come
and save the child--to look out for a woman who had been on deck, under
the bridge. He shouted this woman's name--the one that he
knew--encouraging her to swim, to tread water, to float on wreckage, and
to answer him, until he came to her. There was no response, and when his
voice had grown hoarse and futile, and his feet numb from the cold of
the thawing ice, he returned to the wreckage, weighed down and all but
crushed by the blackest desolation that had, so far, come into his
unhappy life. T