Meanwhile the torch-lights and the flash, sweeping again the farther reaches, lighted fiercely whatever they played on, and thus the intervening lanes of blackness between the lighted ridges of the waves offered momentary asylum. Up one of these dim stretches Newcomb trod water, clinging to his fragment of grating.
How long after he never knew before that moment when he sighted the moving shadow that turned into a lifeboat. A man clung to the gunwale with one hand, and with the other helped hands outstretched from the boat to draw some one on board.
"There is no r-r-room!" a voice was crying. In the midst of the passionate altercation between the officer in charge and a woman in the boat, Grant and Newcomb were hauled in and given rum.
At intervals, with his flash, the officer in charge swept the circumambient shadow. Though Newcomb was beginning to revive, he couldn't face that void. He turned to the human presences nearest him. At his side was a man the officer called Gillow, thick-set, ruddy, with close black beard and lively eyes. Among those last confused recollections on board the Leyden had been this fellow's running up on deck barefoot and in his underclothes. He sat now in somebody's overcoat, with a blanket muffled about his legs and feet. A child somewhere behind began to cry.
Newcomb turned to look back. The exploring light picked out a head in a close-fitting cap tied well down with a heavy veil that left the face uncovered. For an instant Newcomb met the challenging eyes of Greta.
In the bottom of the boat, dead or unconscious, lay the girl, Nan Ellis.
The night wore on, with low-voiced tales of what they had been through. Engineer Gillow told how, in the confusion of the launching, lifeboat No. 11, originally in charge of the officer of the watch, had collided with two other boats. All three were damaged, No. 11 so seriously as to be virtually useless. In the end No. 11 wasn't needed, was Gillow's terse summary of what followed. It hadn't been possible to save everybody; they had done their best. There was a poor devil there in the bow, a naked stoker they had picked up. He'd had his clothes burned off by the fire in the engine-room. Assistant-Engineer Gillow himself had as narrow an escape as any; he'd been asleep while the torpedoed ship was sinking. A rush of sea water had washed him out of his bunk barely in time, as he put it, to catch the last boat. Now he was going to catch forty winks. He folded his short arms with an air of resolution, and dropped his beard into the turned-up collar of the borrowed coat. In two or three minutes he slept. The rest sat waiting for the day.
That dawning, so passionately longed for, showed no hint of man or of his work on all the plain of ocean, not so much as a shattered thwart.
On the lifeboat itself the gray, sun-shrouded morning showed a company of eight men, counting Newcomb, Grant, and the stoker; seven women; four children, fretful from chill and hunger; and a half-grown cabin-boy. The second officer, a wiry, hard-bitten Welshman, was staring through his binoculars north, south, east, west. Hardly would he persuade himself to put the glass down when he would grip hold of it again. Up it would go to eyes that had gleamed an instant with some new, some always futile hope.
The naked stoker had been partly clothed. He lay in a stupor of exhaustion under damp coats and sodden canvas. The gray daylight showed Julian Grant with feverish eyes, and dry lips that said, "Nan's sleeping, too." She shared the tarpaulin which had been spread in the first place for the stoker and two children. Grant and two women, a stewardess and a passenger with a baby, occupied the seat facing the captain and the bow, facing that still figure of Nan Ellis. Miss Greta, as the morning showed, was the only woman not disheveled. Whether in the collision she had been wet at all, she looked dry now, and still rigorously buttoned up, tied down, and belted in. She was still wearing the small flat Rüch-Sak, lying high on her high shoulders, and she kept her eyes on the second officer; especially when, after he had shut his binocular case with a snap, he began to serve out rations of biscuit and water.