"I'm wild!" screamed Hans Füllenberg, who appeared at the entrance to the companionway. "I won't put up with it, or else I'll go insane."
Nevertheless, Hans Füllenberg and Frederick and all the other passengers, though in the last degree exhausted, terrorized, desperate, expecting each moment to be their last, lived through the same awful strain, from hour to hour, from morning till evening, and from evening till morning again.
To most of them it seemed impossible to hold out an hour longer. Yet there were to be three days more of it, they were told, before the Roland reached New York.
XLVI
Monday brought some sunshine, but no diminution of the tempest. It was fearful. Everything on deck not nailed or riveted was removed. The cries at regular intervals piercing the struggling vessel from the steerage more resembled the bellowing of beasts under the knife of the slaughterer than human sounds. Monday night was one prolonged agony. Nobody, unless unconscious from weakness or the tortures of seasickness, closed an eye.
At dawn Tuesday morning, each first-class passenger was startled by the word, "Danger!" quietly uttered at his cabin door by a steward.
Frederick had been lying a while on his bed dressed, when his steward opened the door and according to instructions gravely pronounced the one word, "Danger." At the same time the herald of this message, as fraught with large significance as it was laconic, turned on the electric light. Frederick jumped to a sitting posture, and was annoyed by the water from the leaky pipe, which ran now from one side of the room to the other, as the vessel lurched. At first he was uncertain whether the word he had heard had really been pronounced, or whether it was an illusion of his unstrung nerves. Every night he had been torn with a jerk of his nerves from his restless dozing, only to find that the cause had been a delusive fall or a delusive cry. But now, when he distinctly heard the stewards rapping at the other cabin doors, heard the doors open, and heard the word, "Danger," repeated several times, a sensation came over him that produced a most remarkable change in his condition.
"Very well," he said softly; and, as if he had been summoned to a game that did not concern him, he carefully put on his heavy overcoat, and stepped out into the gangway.
Here there was not a soul.