o alarm was really necessary because she went to pieces
so fast--that he had leaped far over the rail and swam straight out,
fast, in order to escape being dragged down by the suction of the
sinking liner.

The screaming of frightened women and children would ring in his ears
until the day the grave closed over him--screaming that was made all
the more terrible by the crashing roar of the raging black seas which
came out of the darkness to make the affair all the more hideous, and
to bear down beneath them into the sea the feeble struggling ones who
had no chance for their lives. Lifeboats had been smashed in their
davits.

Bentley swam straight away after he was satisfied at last that he
could do nothing more. He had helped men and women reach bits of
wreckage until he could scarcely any longer keep his wearied arms to
the task of keeping his own head above water. He knew even as he
helped the white-faced ones that few of them would ever live through
it, but he was doing the best he knew--a man's job.

When absolutely sure that he could do nothing further, when he could
no longer hear cries of distress, or discover struggling forms in the
sea which he might aid, he had turned his back on the graveyard of
the _Bengal Queen_ and had struck for shore. He remembered the
direction, for before sunset that evening, in company with several
ship's under officers, he had studied the navigation charts upon which
each day's run of the _Bengal Queen_ was shown. Ahead of him now was
the coast of Africa, though what part of it he knew but in the haziest
way. He might not guess within a hundred miles.

* * * * *

One thing only he remembered exactly. The second officer had said,
apropos of nothing in particular:

"This wouldn't be a happy place to be shipwrecked. This section of the
coast is a regular hangout of the great anthropoid apes. You know,
those babies that can pick a man apart as a man would pluck the legs
off a fly."

Bentley had merely grinned. The second officer's remarks had sounded
to him as though the fellow had been reading more than his fair share
of lurid fiction of the South African jungles.

However, apes or no apes, the shore would look good to Lee Bentley
now. And he fully intended making it. He knew he could swim for hours
if it became necessary, and he refused to think of the possibility of
sharks. If one got him, well, that was one of the chances one had to
take when