the instant. There was a great cry. "Push him off! We're
swamping! Push him off!" And one of the women cried to the mate, "Don't
let my little girls drown, sir! Push him away! Save my little girls! Let
him drown!"

It was the animal in them all that had come to the surface in an
instant, the primal instinct of the brute striving for its life and for
the life of its young.

The engineer, exasperated, caught up the stump of one of the broken oars
and beat on the Jew's hands where they were gripped whitely upon the
boat's rim, shouting, "Let go! let go!" But as soon as the Jew relaxed
one hand he caught again with the other. He uttered no cry, but his face
as it came and went over the gunwale of the boat was white and writhing.
When he was at length beaten from the boat he caught again at the oar;
it was drawn in, and the engineer clubbed his head and arms and hands
till the water near by grew red. The little Jew clung to the end of the
oar like a cat, writhing and grunting, his mouth open, and his eyes
fixed and staring. When his hands were gone, he tried to embrace the oar
with his arms. He slid off in the hollow of a wave, his body turned over
twice, and then he sank, his head thrown back, his eyes still open and
staring, and a silver chain of bubbles escaping from his mouth.

"Give way, men!" said the engineer.

"Oh, God!" exclaimed Vandover, turning away and vomiting over the side.

A little while later some one on the bow of the boat called to the
engineer asking why it was they were not heading for the shore. The
engineer did not answer, but Vandover in some way understood that it was
too dangerous to attempt to run the breakers in such heavy weather, and
that they must keep in the open, holding the boat head on to the seas
until either the wind fell or they were picked up by some other vessel.

It was still very dark, and seen under the night from the little boat,
the ocean and the sky seemed immense and terrible; the great waves grew
out of the obscurity ahead of them, rushing down upon the boat, big,
swelling, silent, their crests occasionally hissing and breaking into
irruptions of cold white froth. As one of them would draw near, the boat
would rise upon it as though it would never stop, would hang a moment
upon its summit and then topple into the black gulf that followed,
sending the bitter icy spray high into the air. The wind blew steadily.
Suddenly toward three o'clock it began to rain.

Vandover, th