then, slow, terrible, wide-eyed, floating
breast-high in the flood, a woman drifted out of the narrow room into
the midst of the expectant men. Death had not been able to hide the
agony in her staring eyes, or dull the lines of horror in her waxen,
contorted face. She floated out to them, swaying and bowing, one hand
clutched and fixed in the torn bosom of her dress, a pendant of gold and
pearl swinging from each ear.

A groan of wordless horror went up from the wreckers. For a moment they
stared at the thing rocking and sidling in their midst, with grotesque
motions of life and the face and hands of a terrific death; and then, as
one man, they started to splash, beat and plunge their way to the
companion-steps. The water was set swirling by their frantic efforts, in
eddies and cross-currents which caught the dead woman and drew her,
pitching and turning heavily, in the wakes of the leaders and elbow to
elbow with some of the panic-stricken fellows in the second line of
retreat. They knew the thing was not a ghost; they knew the thing was
not alive, and could not harm them with its pitiful, stiff fingers; they
knew it for the body of a woman who had been drowned in her cabin--and
yet the horror of it chilled them, maddened them, melted their courage
and deadened their powers of reasoning. Even the skipper felt the blind
terror of the encounter in every tingling nerve. The water was deep, the
deck sloped beneath their feet, and the way to the flooded steps of the
companionway seemed a mile long. The fellows who suffered the touch of
those dead elbows that seemed to reach out to them beneath the churning
water yelled wildly, lost their footing and power to advance at one and
the same moment, and soused under, clutching blindly at their comrades.
This brought others down and under who believed that the fingers
gripping them were those of the poor corpse. Screams and yells filled
the cabin and drifted up to the astounded men on the cliff. Heads
vanished; legs and arms beat the imprisoned water to spume; fists and
feet struck living flesh; and one poor, frantic fool clutched the
unconscious cause of all this madness in his arms. Then the skipper,
steadied from his first insanity of fear by the signs of disaster,
lowered his head deliberately, plunged forward and downward, and swam
under water for the companion. In his passage he wrenched floundering
bodies aside and kicked and struck at floundering legs and arms. Coming
to t