The woman, though she spoke no English, guessed the meaning of the question, and shrieked with terror.
"Oh, all right, ma'am," the sailor went on, in a tone of good-humored resignation. "I'll make sure of you, and hope that some one else won't drown."
With one arm around her, the other hand holding tight to the rope the jacky allowed himself to be hauled in alongside the launch.
"Take this lady in, quick!" ordered Jacky. "She's about all in with the cold."
"Better come on board, too, Streeter," advised a petty officer on the launch.
"Too much to be done," replied Seaman Streeter, shoving off and starting to swim back.
"Your teeth are chattering now," called the petty officer, but Seaman Streeter, with lusty strokes, was heading for a hatless, white-haired old man whom he made out, under the searchlight glare, a hundred yards away. This man, too chilled to swim for himself, though buoyed up by a belt, Streeter brought in.
"Come on board, Streeter," insisted the same petty officer.
But surely that jacky was deaf, for he turned and once more struck out. By the time that the liner had been down four minutes, and the last visible and living person in the water had been rescued, Seaman Streeter had brought in six men and women, five of whom would surely have died of the cold had he not gone to their aid. And he had turned to swim back after a possible seventh.
Nearly six hundred passengers and members of the sunken liner's crew had been saved. Of these the greatest sufferers were taken aboard the "Grigsby" and the "Reed" and the remainder were left in the boats, which were towed astern.