The Andromeda, uncontrollable as destiny, and quite as heedless of her human freight, swung round with the current until her bows pointed to the islet occupied by the marksmen. All at once, Coke suspended his flow of invectives and rushed into the chart-room, where Iris heard him tearing lockers open and throwing their contents on the deck. To enter, he was obliged to leap over the body of the dying man. The action was grotesque, callous, almost inhuman; it jarred the girl's agonized transports back into a species of spiritual calm, a mental state akin to the fatalism often exhibited by Asiatics when death is imminent and not to be denied. The apparent madness of the captain was now more distressing to her than the certain loss of the ship or the invisible missiles that clanged into white patches on the iron plates, cut sudden holes and scars in the woodwork, or whirred through the air with a buzzing whistle of singularly menacing sound. She began to be afraid of remaining on the bridge; her fear was not due to the really vital fact that it was so exposed; it arose from the purely feminine consideration that she was sure Coke had become a raving maniac, and she dreaded meeting him when, if ever, he reappeared.
A bullet struck the front frame of the chart-room, and several panes of glass were shattered with a fearful din. That decided her. Coke, if he were not killed, would surely be driven out. She sprang to her feet, and literally ran down the steep ladder to the saloon deck. Through the open door of the officers' mess she witnessed another bizarre act—an act quite as extraordinary in its way as Coke's jump over the steersman's body. In the midst of this drama of death and destruction, Watts was standing there, with head thrown back and uplifted arm, gulping down a tumblerful of some dark-colored liquid, draining it to the dregs, while he held a black bottle in the other hand. That a man should fly to rum for solace when existence itself might be measured by minutes or seconds, was, to Iris, not the least amazing experience of an episode crammed with all that was new, and strange, and horrible in her life. She raced on, wholly unaware that the drifting ship was now presenting her port bow to the death-dealing fusillade.
Then, from somewhere, she heard a gruff voice:
"Hev' ye shut off steam, Macfarlane?"
"Ou ay. It's a' snug below till the watter reaches the furnaces," came the answer.
So some of the men were doing their duty. Thank God for that! Undeterred by the fact that a live shell had burst among the engines, the oil-stained, grim-looking engineers had not quitted their post until they had taken such precautions as lay in their power to insure the ship's safety. A light broke in on the fog in the girl's mind. Even now, at the very gate of eternity, one might try to help others! The thought brought a ray of comfort. She was about to look for the speakers when a bullet drilled a hole in a panel close to her side. She began to run again, for a terrified glance through the forward gangway showed that the ship was quite close to the land, where men in blue uniforms, wearing curiously shaped hats and white gaiters, were scattered among the rocks, some standing, some kneeling, some prone, but all taking steady aim.
But it showed something more. Hozier was now lying sideways on the raised deck of the forecastle; he partly supported himself on his right arm; his left hand was pressed to his forehead; he was trying to rise. With an intuition that was phenomenal under the circumstances, Iris realized that he was screened from observation for the moment by the windlass and the corpse that lay across it. But the ship's ever increasing speed, and the curving course of her drifting, would soon bring him into sight, and then those merciless riflemen would shoot him down.
"Oh, not that! Not that!" she wailed aloud.
An impulse stronger than the instinct of self-preservation caused the blood to tingle in her veins. She had waited to take that one look, and now, bent double so as to avoid being seen by the soldiers, she sped back through the gangway, gained the open deck, crouched close to the bulwarks on the port side, and thus reached unscathed the foot of the companion down which the wounded men had crawled. The zinc plates on the steps were slippery with their blood, but she did not falter at the sight. Up she went, stooped over Hozier, and placed her strong young arms round his body.
"Quick!" she panted, "let me help you! You will be killed if you remain here!"