He choked with his laughter and gasped for breath.
"If it were possible for a bodiless spirit to perish, I should think that I am dying twice, Beatrice. The air is thick—this air of hell!"
He broke off short in his whispering and raised himself suddenly to an elbow. With the coming of death his voice grew strong and rang clearly: "They are in the corners—they are coming closer! Beatrice! Brush them away with your fingers as cold as snow. Beatrice, oh, my dear!"
And he was dead as he fell back on the bunk.
Sloan was already on the deck outside the wireless house, shrieking with all the power of his lungs: "Fire! Fire! The wheat in the hold!"
CHAPTER 37
And as Harrigan and McTee, followed by Kate and Campbell, ran out to the open air, they saw the crowd of the mutineers surge across the waist toward Sloan with upturned faces, wondering, and ready for terror. Hovey broke through their midst.
"Hovey!" shouted McTee. "Look at the mist over the sides! Draw a breath; smell of it! It is fire! Henshaw has set fire in the hold!"
It was plain to every brain in the instant. To every man came the thought of the complaints of the firemen concerning the heat in the hold of the Heron; the noxious odor like musty straw; the warmth, the deadly warmth of the decks. A volcano smoldered beneath them, and the mist was the sign of the coming outbreak of flames. And the mutineers stood mute, gaping at one another, looking for some hope, some comfort, and finding the same question repeated in every eye. McTee climbed down the ladder to the waist, followed by the rest of the fugitives. Ten minutes before they would have been torn to pieces by the wolf pack. Now no man had a thought for anything save his own death.
"Hovey," ordered McTee in his voice of thunder, "tell these fellows they must obey my voice from now on."