Menial labour fell to the lot of the lordly but uncomplaining Landover, to Block and Nicklestick, Jones and Snipe, and even to the precious Signor Joseppi, who, forgetting his Caruso-like throat, toiled and sweated in the smoky saloon.
Morris Shine, the motion picture magnate, the while he laboured amidst the wreckage of the after deck, lamented not the cheerless task but the evil fate that prevented the making of the most spectacular film the world had ever known.
Madame Careni-Amori, Madame Obosky and her dancers; bejewelled Jewesses and half-clad emigrants; gentle women unused to toil and women who were born to it; the old and the young—all of them, without exception,—rose from the depths of despair and faced the rigours of the day with unflinching courage, gave out of a limitless store of tenderness all that their strength could spare.
And through a neglected, abandoned field of pearls and gold and precious stones, limped unchallenged the tireless figure of “Soapy” Shay, diamond thief, a bloody bandage about his head, an exalted light in his pain-stricken eyes. His one-time captor lay stark and cold in the gruesome line in the bow of the boat. It was “Soapy” Shay who staggered out of the rack and smoke with the burly, stricken detective in his arms, and it was “Soapy” Shay who wept when the last breath of life cased out through his tortured lips. For of all the company on board the Doraine, there was but one whom “Soapy” knew, but one who called him by name and shared tobacco with him,—and that one was William Spinney, the man who was taking him back to a place where mercy would not be shown.
After the sun had set and the decks were dark and deserted except for the men employed in the gruesome business, the dead were lowered into the sea, swathed in canvas and weighted with things that were made to kill,—shells from the gunners' hoard. Swiftly, methodically, one after the other, they slid down to the black, greedy waters, sank to the grave that is never still yet always silent, to the vast, unexplored wilderness that stretches around the world. The thin little missionary from the barren plateaus of Patagonia and the plump priest from the heart of Buenos Aires monotonously commended each and every one of them to the mercy of God!
The sun came up again in the morning over a smiling, happy sea that licked the sides of the Doraine with the tenderness of a dog.
CHAPTER V.
The plight of the hapless steamer could not be disguised. Even the most ignorant passenger knew that the wrecked engines could not be repaired or compounded. They knew that the Doraine was completely paralysed. The power to move at will was for ever lost, the force that had driven her resistlessly along the chosen path was still. The powerful propellers were idle, the huge stern-post wrenched so badly that the rudder was useless. She was adrift, helplessly adrift. Of what avail the wheel and a patched-up rudder to the mass that lay inert, motionless on the smiling sea?
Every one on board realized, with sinking heart, that the Doraine was to go on drifting, drifting no man knew whither, until she crossed the path of a friendly stranger out there in the mighty waste. No cry of distress, no call for help could go crackling into the boundless reaches. That was the plight of the Doraine and her people on the mocking day that followed the disaster, and unless fate intervened that would be her plight for days without end.