The Wrecking Master

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

Captain Bruce jumped to his feet and gruffly broke into this dismal kind of talk:

"Get all the men you can and come below with me. Her after part is still afloat and tight, and if we can brace the midship bulkheads with enough timbers and cargo, they may hold for a while yet."

It was a forlorn hope, but even the seamen and stokers were glad to be doing something to save the ship, and most of them rallied to the call of the captain and mate and followed them down into the gloomy hold. Dan went along to try to do what he could, and also because he remembered that Captain Jim had told him to "keep his eyes and ears open."

"If we abandon the Kenilworth," thought Dan, "and I see Uncle Jim again, the first thing he will ask me is what shape we left the steamer in—had she begun to break in two, and how badly was she flooded, and so on. I guess it's part of my job to find out all I can."

He picked up a lantern which had been overlooked and crept after the men, down one slippery iron ladder after another. It was a terrifying trip below decks where the angry ocean sounded as if it were about to tear its way through the vessel's side, amid an awful hubbub of shifting cargo, and breaking beams and plates. Dan hesitated more than once and tried to choke down his fear. He was in strange quarters and the men ahead of him, used to finding their way all over the vessel, moved much faster than he. They had reached the engine-room and were moving forward while he was still clinging to the last ladder. Then a lurch of the ship dashed his lantern against the hand-rail. The glass globe was smashed and the light went out.

The electric lighting plant had been disabled and the cavern of an engine-room was in black darkness as Dan vainly searched his pockets for matches. He heard faint shouts from somewhere forward and thought he saw the gleam of lanterns. He tried to grope his way toward them, but stumbled and fell against a steel column. With aching head he staggered to his feet just as the whole hull of the ship seemed to be raised bodily and let fall on the Reef with a deafening crash. Dan was more frightened and confused than ever. A moment later his feet began to splash in water. He thought the sea had broken into the engine-room, and he tried, with frantic haste, to find his way back to the ladder and regain the deck above. By this time he had completely lost his bearings. He did not know whether he was going toward the bow or stern. At length his trembling fingers clutched the rail of a ladder which ran upward from a narrow passageway. It led him to another deck still far down in the vessel's hold, where he could find no more ladders to climb. After what seemed to him hours of feeling his way this way and that, he bumped against a solid steel wall. Dan knew it was a bulkhead of some kind, but it must be far from the toiling crew of the ship, for he had long since ceased to hear or see them. He had never been in such utter darkness nor so hopelessly lost and bewildered.

The frightened lad shouted for help, but his voice could not have been heard a dozen feet away, so great was the din around him. He tried to think, to get back his sense of direction, to feel his way along the bulkhead in the hope of getting his hands on some object with whose outline he was familiar, which might tell him into what part of the ship he had wandered.

He was leaning against the steel wall of the bulkhead when it buckled, sprang back, and then quivered as if it had been a sheet of tin. There was a tremendous noise of crackling, rending timber and steel above Dan's head. He whirled about and tried to flee as he heard the collapsing bulkhead give way.

The boy could hear the cargo toppling toward him with the roar of a landslide. He threw up his arms to shield his head, then something struck him in the back and hurled him to one side. He fell across a bulky box of some kind while other heavy boxes, a deluge of them, thundered from above and crashed all round him. Dan cowered in a frightened heap, expecting every instant to have his life crushed out. But gradually the descent of the cargo ceased, and he was still alive.

He tried to move his legs and found they had not been smashed. Struggling to turn over on his back he put up his arms and discovered that a huge packing case had so fallen as to make a bridge over him and keep clear the little space in which he crouched. But he was walled in by packing cases on all sides and he struggled in vain to move them. Until his fingers were torn and bleeding and his strength worn out, Dan tried to make an opening large enough to wriggle through and escape from this appalling prison.