ognised,
were still heroically executing orders. But they got entangled in
fighting groups. One of them covered with blood, struggling and shouting,
helped a woman and her child into a life-boat, but the boat capsized and
disappeared.

"Father! My father!" Ingigerd suddenly cried. It was only a faint breath
blown away by the raging elements. She pointed, and Frederick looked
where she pointed with vacant, staring eyes. Again the fog lifted and
opened a sort of gap through which the sinking steamer could be seen in
all its length. Somebody was standing at the railing waving a white
handkerchief. It was impossible to tell who it was. But a man whom
Frederick recognised as distinctly as if he were looking through a
spy-glass was Hans Fuellenberg, racing about like a madman, leaping with
the agility of a squirrel from one point of the deck to the other.

The port-holes, making a slanting line from stem to stern, still shone
with the electric lights inside. Now and then a stifled shot could be
heard, as a rocket rose up into the air, making a pale line of light. But
soon the gem-like gleam of the port-holes was extinguished. As if the sea
in its unbridled hate of man's work had been waiting for this event, it
swept over the deck from the other side. That instant the waters on the
near side swarmed with human beings, swimming, shrieking, and struggling.

Suddenly, no one knew how, the boat was carried close to the _Roland_
again, where maddened, half-drowned, desperate men clutched at it. A
hideous, bestial conflict began.

Frederick saw it all, yet without seeing it. Although it went on under
his very eyes, it seemed to be happening at an infinite distance. He
struck at something. It was a hand, an arm, a head, a wet monster of the
deep, shrieking in a voice not human. Suddenly, pulled backwards by the
merciless hands of a hidden executioner, it disappeared. Frederick saw
how, with the strength of desperation, Rosa's red fists and Mrs.
Liebling's and Ingigerd's little cramped fingers unloosened the hold of
the hand or arm of a fellow-man from the icy edge of the boat. The
sailors used their oars in a way that produced dark spurts of blood.

None in the boat noticed that the third mate disappeared, that Bulke
took his place at the helm, and that in the bottom of the boat lay a
long-haired young man, who gave no sign of life.

The servant, Bulke, took command. For the sake of something to do and to
delay the inevitable c