“TO-NIGHT, Doctor,” said Leyden one evening as we went on deck, “let us forswear the exchange of blood-curdling yarns. Let us be sociable and play poker with my Czechian friend, Rosenthal, and Mr. Mallock.”
I agreed and we went into the rook kamer, where the others presently joined us. We played for perhaps an hour; I do not remember just how the game stood when we were interrupted by a tragic incident.
From somewhere beneath us there came a sudden muffled roar; the little vessel quivered as though struck by a shell; an instant of silence, then up from below there came a scream so wild and hoarse and laden with fearful human anguish that we all leaped to our feet. Shouts, yells, orders in half a dozen tongues rose in a clamorous medley; but through them all as a bugle rings out on the firing-line there rose again that wild, wide-throated scream of intolerable physical pain.
I knew the sound. I had heard it several times. The latest was in San Francisco on one of the big United States transports when a stevedore had up-ended a crate of primers which had exploded and filled the man’s body with splinters so that he looked like a porcupine. Leyden had heard it also, as the first glance at his face told me, and from his expression I saw that he had guessed the present cause; but there was no time to inquire, for the screams now followed each other in quick succession and were approaching, and such screams! Opposite me Rosenthal, who had thrown down his hand at the beginning of the play and was about to take a swallow of his Rhine wine, paused, the glass half way to his lips, and hardened, world-worn adventurer that the Jew was, he positively looked sickened at the sound.
And then the clamor reached our deck, but forward, and we turned as one man and stepped out of the rook kamer. Abreast of the steam steering-gear there was a confused mass of yelling, gyrating figures, and from these we saw emerge a single one who with outspread arms and wide fingers came lurching toward us, and as he ran he screamed.
The bulk of my professional work has been of an emergency character, so that even as the man approached I was framing a diagnosis, and before he had reached the part of the deck where we stood, it was made. The jar of the explosion, the screams of appalling pain, and now, swiftly as he approached, the suffocating fumes of ammonia had preceded him, and I knew on the instant that there had been an explosion of the ice-making machine and that the victim was one who had bathed in the liquid fire set loose. Then as he bore down upon us, followed by the clamoring crowd who sought to restrain him for his good, something of the spirit of the hunted animal fastened on the poor frenzied intellect and he sprang for the rail.
“Ach, no!” muttered Leyden in my ear, and at the same instant leaped like a cat; one of his powerful, nervous hands closed on the man’s naked shoulder and the next moment the poor wretch was on his back, pawing the air, groping at his livid face, while his screams smote back the crowd of the curious.
“Quick, Doctor!” said Leyden, and the words wedged in his throat as the pungent fumes gripped his trachea. He tried again to speak, but by that time I had seized Rosenthal’s bottle of Rhine wine from the table and had begun to pour it over the man’s face. Of course, there are better things than Rhine wine with which to neutralize stronger ammonia, but that was the nearest at hand and haste was requisite.
Presently the ship’s doctor arrived with dilute acetic acid; by that time Leyden and I were both nearly asphyxiated and the man was in a syncope, poor fellow! He saw light again, but never outline.