gasp I woke. Our
sickly lantern was guttering in a sooty stream of smoke. Young Mansfield
stood in the center of the cabin buckling his pistol belt. From
somewhere came a sound of rushing water and a medley of shouts and oaths
and pistol shots. A dingy rat scuttled wildly out from between my feet
and whisked away through the crack under our bolted door. While I stood
there stupidly inactive, hardly as yet untangling fact and dream,
Mansfield handed me my belt and revolver.

"Slip on your shoes and fetch along a life-belt," he commanded steadily.
"It has come."

We jerked open the door and groped along the alley-way in darkness, and,
as we guided our steps with hands fumbling the walls, water washed about
our ankles. The lights there had gone out. With one guiding hand on the
wall and one on Mansfield's shoulder, I made my labored way toward the
deck ladder.

Without a word and as of right, the young Englishman, who had heretofore
lacked initiative, now assumed command of our affairs. We needed no
explanation to tell us that the pandemonium which reigned above was not
merely the result of mutiny. A hundred patent things testified that this
shambling tramp of the seas had received a mortal hurt. The stench of
bilge sickened us as the rising water in her hull forced up the heavy
and fetid gases. The walls themselves were aslant under a dizzy
careening to starboard.

She must have steamed full front on to a submerged reef and destruction.
It was palpably no matter of an opening seam. She had been torn and
ripped in her vitals. She was dying fast and in inanimate agony. In the
rickety engine-room something had burst loose under the strain. Now as
she sank and reeled there came a hissing of steam; a gasping, coughing,
hammering convulsion of pistons, rods and driving shafts, suddenly
turned into a junk heap running amuck.

It is questionable whether there would have been time to lower away
boats had the most perfect discipline and heroism prevailed. There was
no discipline. There were no available boats, except the two hanging
from the bridge davits, and about them, as we stumbled out on the decks,
raged a fierce battle of extermination, as men, relapsed to brutes,
fought for survival.

I have since that night often and vainly attempted to go back over that
holocaust and arrange its details in some sort of chronology. I saw such
ferocity and confusion, turning the deck into a shambles in an
inconceivably short space,