A man rushed up the bridge steps coming from aft.
"She's sinking, sir," he panted, pointing to the dim shadow of the rammed ship drifting astern. The steady roar of her siren told of the danger, and seemed to be a resonant cry for help.
The master gazed aft. Then he rushed to the pilot-house window and took up the night glass hanging there. He looked hard at the ship now lying astern and riding with her bows high in the air. The man was right. She was rapidly going down. Ten minutes at the most would tell the whole story.
"Get the starboard boats out, Mr. James," called the captain in an even tone, "and let no one but the crews in them. The first man who attempts to get in will be shot. Go to the vessel and bring back all you can—quick——"
But the form there had vanished before he had finished speaking. The chief officer had awakened at last from his stupor. His responsibility came back to him with a rush of feeling. But an instant before he had faced the end. He had decided to kill himself at once, and was just about to go to his room for his gun. He was too ashamed to face the ordeal, the ordeal of the officer who has run down a ship in a clear night. There had been literally no excuse for him. He could not plead ignorance of the laws; his license as officer made that impossible. He knew what to do when raising a light to starboard when that light was red. The rules were plainly written. Every common waterman knew them by heart. He had disobeyed them by some mischance, some mistake he could not exactly define; but he knew that under it all was that dull, sullen apathy from a wrong, or fancied wrong, that had caused him to be negligent.
He would not go upon the witness stand and say that, because a woman did not love him, he had allowed his ship to ram a liner with fifteen hundred souls aboard her in a clear night. No! Death was a hundred, a thousand times better than such ignominy, such a miserable, cowardly sort of excuse. He would blow his brains out just as soon as he saw the finish, just as soon as he knew his vessel would float. Then came the captain's voice of command:
"Get out the starboard boats and save all you can——"
Yes, it was his duty; his above all others. He was at number one boat before the master had finished his orders.
Six good men were at their stations. The falls were run taut, the boat shoved clear, and down she went with a rush into the sea. Nine others followed within a minute, and ten boats pulled away into the darkness astern, where the roar of the siren still sounded loud and resonant—a wild, terrible cry of death and destruction.
James met a boat coming toward him before he reached the ship. She was full. Sixty-two men and women filled her, and she just floated, and that was all, her gunwales awash in the smooth sea. The swell lifted her, and she rose high above him, a dark object against the sky. Then she sank slowly down into the trough, and disappeared behind the hill of water that ran smoothly from the northeast in long, heaving seas.