The iron seared and crisped his flesh as his feet touched the torture. He could feel the skin curl and harden. Gritting his teeth, he sped at topmost speed of the house whither the aerials led.
The door was jammed!
Though the skin of his head seemed to tighten like a metal band, though his lungs stabbed within him as he breathed, though the pain in his feet was unendurable, Eric wrenched again and again at the handle, but the door would not budge. He called, but there was no answer. Almost delirious with baffled rage and excruciating suffering, the boy hurled himself against the door, throwing his shoulder out of joint with the power of the blow. The door fell inwards and he fell with it.
The heat that poured from the room was overpowering, a dull red glow in the far corner of the floor showing that the flames were immediately beneath. With a gasp and a clutch on his reeling senses, Eric saw stretched out on the wireless table before him the figure of a man, moaning slightly, but insensible. Unable to stand on the hot floor, unable to escape from the room in which he had become trapped, he had lain down on the instruments and his writhings near the key had sent those tangled messages that the operator on the Itasca had not been able to understand.
Had it not been for the instinctive stimulus of his life-saving training, Eric would have deemed that the man was beyond help and would have sought safety himself. But his whirling senses held the knowledge how often life lingers when it appears extinct. Scarcely conscious himself of what he did, Eric grasped the unconscious man in his arms, raced back across the terror of the red-hot deck, reached the stern—how, he never knew—threw his moaning burden overboard and dived in after him.
The shock as his parched and blistered body struck the cold sea water steadied Eric for a second, just long enough to grasp the man he had rescued, as the latter came floating to the surface. Then the pain of the salt water upon his cruel burns smote him, and he felt himself give way.
He tugged twice at the life-line as a signal that he was at his last gasp, bidding them pull in. Then, gripping the last flicker of his purposed energy on the one final aim—not to loose hold in the sea of the man he had rescued from an intolerable death, the boy locked himself to the sufferer in the "side carry" he once had known so well.
A sinking blackness came over him, flashes of violet flame danced before his eyes, his head suddenly seemed to be as though of lead, his legs stiffened and refused to move, and in the lurid glare of the burning steamer, rescuer and rescued sank beneath the waves. The last thing that Eric felt was the tug on the life-line underneath his arms. His cry for help was answered! The Coast Guard boat was near.