Then the captain looked round him, seemingly for a messenger. The mate of the watch hung on to the handle of the engine-room telegraph, which still pointed to “full speed ahead,” looking dazed and helpless. The quartermaster’s hands were mechanically sawing at the spokes of the wheel, but it was equally evident that he also did not know what he was doing. Just then Onslow raced up the bridge ladder three steps at a time.
“Ah,” cried Kettle, “now you are a man who can keep his head in a bit of a fluster, and by James you’re the only one on board. Just tumble forward, will you, and get down into that hold? See what’s wrong.”
Onslow nodded and turned to go without a word. From two or three of the men a thin cheer rose as he passed them, and before he had gained the bottom of the ladder on to the iron lower deck, half a dozen were on the top rungs after him. Sailors will seldom refuse to follow when a superior shows the way; and besides, these fellows were getting over their first panic, and were beginning to be ashamed of themselves for giving way to it.
The mizzen trysail was not then set, and because the steamer’s way had left her, she was falling off into the trough, and rolling bulwarks under to every sea. She was shipping water fast. The creaming, solid masses sluicing across the deck-plates smote the men breech high with the weight of rams; and he who, when the waters were upon him, left his hold, would have been swept like a cork to leeward. But, by the hatch-coamings, the winches, and odd wet streamers of rope, they clawed their way forward, and cowered round the great hole made by the explosion, holding there by the edge of the twisted, riven plates. The seas creamed over their heads, falling in noisy cascades into the blackness below, and from out of that darkness, above all the bellowing of wind and the clanging of iron and the other din, came a sodden whistling of water, which seemed to confirm the worst fears.
“Pooh!” said some one, trying to be cheery, “that’s only the small sup she’s shipped since the hatches were blown off. The bilge pumps’ll soon kick that drop overboard.”
“Guess you lie,” said another, with a weary shake of the head.
Then the ink of the heavens overhead was splashed with a vivid fork of lightning, and the men saw Onslow, with his face as white as his teeth, lowering himself over the brink, and gripping with his knees a twisted iron pillar below. The light above slapped out, and within the dim, jagged outline of where the hatch had been all was blackness. And overhead the thunder rumbled like the passing of a Titan’s gun-train. The men shivered. One of them, an old, white-haired able-seaman, was physically sick. And meanwhile the Port Edes rolled through forty-two degrees, and the Gulf water flowed in green and black over each bulwark alternately.
The men hung over the dark abyss of the hatch listening intently, and above the noises of the gale they could hear the sullen wash of water in the hold growing heavier and more sullen with every roll. Another flash of lightning blazed out overhead, painting white the shaft of the hatch, and showing at its foot a muddy sea, full of floating straws, and barrel staves, and litter. Onslow was out of sight. And the lower hold was afloat almost to its deck-beams.
But presently the explorer returned, swimming rather than walking—as another flash showed them—and he leaped to the battens which made the stairway to overhead with the haste of a man who knows that the waste of moments may well cost human lives. The men clustered about him round-eyed as he gained the deck for a word of what he had seen, but he brushed through them roughly and made for aft. It seemed to them that no spoken sentence could have given a worse report of what had befallen than this mute action. The fellows knew that officers always made the best of everything, if there is a best to be made; and so the silence was terribly suggestive.
At the same moment, as if to confirm their worst fears, the steamer took a heavy sea clean over her forecastle head; and above the din of the water, as it came cascading down into the lower deck, there arose wild cries of, “She’s sinking!” “Her bottom’s blown out!” “She’s settling by the head!”