, if
he were not killed, would surely be driven out. She sprang to her
feet, and literally ran down the steep ladder to the saloon deck.
Through the open door of the officers' mess she witnessed another
bizarre act--an act quite as extraordinary in its way as Coke's jump
over the steersman's body. In the midst of this drama of death and
destruction, Watts was standing there, with head thrown back and
uplifted arm, gulping down a tumblerful of some dark-colored liquid,
draining it to the dregs, while he held a black bottle in the other
hand. That a man should fly to rum for solace when existence itself
might be measured by minutes or seconds, was, to Iris, not the least
amazing experience of an episode crammed with all that was new, and
strange, and horrible in her life. She raced on, wholly unaware that
the drifting ship was now presenting her port bow to the death-dealing
fusillade.

Then, from somewhere, she heard a gruff voice:

"Hev' ye shut off steam, Macfarlane?"

"Ou ay. It's a' snug below till the watter reaches the furnaces," came
the answer.

So some of the men were doing their duty. Thank God for that!
Undeterred by the fact that a live shell had burst among the engines,
the oil-stained, grim-looking engineers had not quitted their post
until they had taken such precautions as lay in their power to insure
the ship's safety. A light broke in on the fog in the girl's mind.
Even now, at the very gate of eternity, one might try to help others!
The thought brought a ray of comfort. She was about to look for the
speakers when a bullet drilled a hole in a panel close to her side.
She began to run again, for a terrified glance through the forward
gangway showed that the ship was quite close to the land, where men in
blue uniforms, wearing curiously shaped hats and white gaiters, were
scattered among the rocks, some standing, some kneeling, some prone,
but all taking steady aim.

But it showed something more. Hozier was now lying sideways on the
raised deck of the forecastle; he partly supported himself on his right
arm; his left hand was pressed to his forehead; he was trying to rise.
With an intuition that was phenomenal under the circumstances, Iris
realized that he was screened from observation for the moment by the
windlass and the corpse that lay across it. But the ship's ever
increasing speed, and the curving course of her drifting, would soon
bring him into sight, and then those merciless rifl