that even now I cannot say in what sequence
these things happened. I have a jumbled picture in which certain
unimportant details stand out distinctly while great things are vague. I
can still see, in steel-black relief, the silhouetted superstructure,
funnels and stanchions; the indigo shadows and ghostly spots of white
under a low-swinging half-moon and large softly-glowing stars. The sky
was clear and smiling, in the _risor sardonicus_ of my dream.

I have sometimes felt that all the difference between the courageous and
craven lies in the chance of the instant with which the numbers fall on
the dice of life. To-day's coward may be to-morrow's hero. For an
instant, with an unspeakable babel in my ears and a picture of human
battle in my eyes, I knew only the chaotic confusion that comes of
panic. Then I caught a glimpse of one detail and all physical fear fell
away from me. I found myself conscious only of contempt for the
struggling, clawing terror of these men who were as reasonless and
ineffective as stampeding cattle. The detail which steadied me like a
cold shower was the calmness of young Mansfield as he waited at my side,
his face as impersonally puzzled as though he were studying in some
museum cabinet a new and strange specimen of anthropological interest.

We both stood in the shadow of the forward superstructure as yet unseen.
All the ferocity of final crisis swirled and eddied about the bridge
upon which we looked as men in orchestra chairs might look across the
footlights on a stage set for melodrama. Apparently the crew had already
discovered to its own despair that Coulter's inhuman orders for
scuttling the boats had been carried out, and that of all the emergency
craft carried by the _Wastrel_, only those ridiculously insufficient
ones hanging by the port and starboard lights of the bridge offered a
chance of escape. At all events, the other boats hung neglected and
unmanned. That the whole question was one of minutes was an unescapable
conclusion. One could almost feel the settling of the crazy, ruptured
hull as the moments passed and each time I turned my head to glance
back with a fascinated impulse at the smoke-stack I could see that its
line tilted further from the vertical.

Heffernan was in charge of the starboard boat, already beginning to run
down its lines, and over that on the port side, Coulter himself held
command.

It seemed that when the moment of final issue came, a few of the
forem