ood-bye, I'm going back to the ship."

He disappeared for a moment, then reappeared where a rail was slipping
under water. Cool and courageous to the end, loyal to his duty under the
most difficult circumstances, he showed himself a noble captain, and he
died a noble death.

SAW BOTH OFFICERS PERISH

Quartermaster Moody saw all this, watched the skipper scramble aboard
again onto the submerged decks, and then vanish altogether in a great
billow.

As Moody's eye lost sight of the skipper in this confusion of waters it
again shifted to the bridge, and just in time to see Murdock take his
life. The man's face was turned toward him, Moody said, and he could
not mistake it. There were still many gleaming lights on the ship,
flickering out like little groups of vanishing stars, and with the
clear starshine on the waters there was nothing to cloud or break the
quartermaster's vision.

"I saw Murdock die by his own hand," said Moody, "saw the flash from
his gun, heard the crack that followed the flash and then saw him plunge
over on his face."

Others report hearing several pistol shots on the decks below the
bridge, but amid the groans and shrieks and cries, shouted orders and
all that vast orchestra of sounds that broke upon the air they must have
been faint periods of punctuation

BAND PLAYED ITS OWN DIRGE

The band had broken out in the strains of "Nearer, My God, to Thee,"
some minutes before Murdock lifted the revolver to his head, fired and
toppled over on his face. Moody saw all this in a vision that filled his
brain, while his ears drank in the tragic strain of the beautiful hymn
that the band played as their own dirge, even to the moment when the
waters sucked them down.

Wherever Murdock's eye swept the water in that instant, before he drew
his revolver, it looked upon veritable seas of drowning men and women.
From the decks there came to him the shrieks and groans of the caged and
drowning, for whom all hope of escape was utterly vanished. He evidently
never gave a thought to the possibility of saving himself, his mind
freezing with the horrors he beheld and having room for just one central
idea--swift extinction.

The strains of the hymn and the frantic cries of the dying blended in a
symphony of sorrow.

Led by the green light, under the light of stars, the boats drew away,
and the bow, then the quarter, then the stacks and last the stern of the
marvel ship of a few days before passed beneath the