“Isn’t there?” indignantly demanded the lady in a queer sort of half suffocated voice from behind the barred door of her cabin. “If you were jumbled in a pool of water, with all your luggage on top of you, I don’t think you’d think everything right. Help, man! release me at once, or I’ll be drowned and flattened into a pancake!”
“Say, you Mister Steward, you jest hurry up and git the lady out of her muss, and come and fix me up,” chimed in the voice of Mr Zachariah Lathrope. “I guess I’ve had my innards a’most squoze out agin the durned bunk, an’ feel like a dough-nut in a frying-pan. If you leave me much longer I kalkerlate this old boss’ll be cold meat, you bet, and you’ll have the funeral to pay!”
Mr Meldrum coming to Llewellyn’s aid, the steward managed at length to clear away the wreckage from before the door of Mrs Major Negus’ cabin, and then from that of the American, when both the occupants were found more seriously hurt than either of their rescuers had imagined, they thinking that their outcries had proceeded more from alarm than any real injury.
The wife of the deputy-assistant comptroller-general of Waikatoo was lying, all purple in the face, with a heavy portmanteau on the top of her, on the deck of her cabin in nearly a foot of water; and by the time they got her up from her perilous position she fainted dead away in the steward’s arms.
“Here, Mary!” called out Llewellyn to his wife, the stewardess, who quickly appeared on the scene half-dressed. “Attend to this lady, while we go and see after Mister Lathrope.”
The American was in a much worse plight; for, whereas Mrs Major Negus had only swallowed a lot of sea-water and had been only nearly frightened to death, Mr Lathrope’s sallow face was so unearthly pale that Mr Meldrum was certain he had received some severe injury; as he was tightly jammed between his bunk and the washing-stand, while a heavy packing-case had tumbled out of the top berth on to one of his shoulders, preventing him from moving.
“I guess, mister, you jest come in time,” said the poor fellow with a sickly smile, as they pulled away the case and wash-stand, and helped him into a sitting position on the bunk, “another minnit and it would have been all up with Z Lathrope, Esquire!” And he gasped for breath, putting his hand to his left side, as if feeling pain there.
“Oh, papa, are you there?” said Kate, coming out, in a charming state of dishabille, from the state-room she shared with her sister on the opposite side of the saloon, alongside to that of Mr Meldrum. “Is anybody hurt?”
“Yes, my dear,” answered her father, “you’d better bring some sal volatile or something. Mrs Negus has fainted; and I’m afraid poor Mr Lathrope is in a bad way.”
The plucky girl did not delay, or exhibit any of that feminine weakness or nervousness which might have been expected under the circumstances. Retiring for a moment, to throw a shawl round herself and get what was required in the emergency, she quickly reappeared again at the door of the state-room,—which she closed behind her to prevent Miss Florry, inquisitive as usual, from coming forth; and then proceeded to cross the floor of the cuddy as well as she was able—a somewhat difficult task considering the rolling and pitching of the vessel, and the fact that the table and seats, which generally formed points of vantage for holding on, had been swept away, so that there was nothing for her to cling to.