"Yes, sir; one man got away in the skipper's boat—that's them headin' for the lightship over there," and he pointed to a blur that showed through the hazy night. I began to gather my senses again, but I couldn't make head or tail of it. What did that fellow nail me for? I had hit him, to be sure; but that was for a purpose. He surely intended to fix me, all right. About a minute more, and I would have gone with the ship.
"Cowardly rat!" I whispered.
"Who?" asked Driscoll.
"That white-livered dog who knocked me out," I said, gritting my teeth at the thought.
"Better lie quiet, sir; better keep still—you're bug a bit, but will be all right to-morrow. Does it hurt you much, sir?"
"Shut up!" I commanded ungratefully, and Driscoll gazed at me sorrowfully, pulling away again at his oar, for we were now almost to the lightship.
All that night we lay trailing astern. There was a long line of lifeboats reaching nearly half a mile back, all hanging to the taffrail of the ship.
About daylight she got in touch with a passing passenger ship, bound in, and while we were busy shifting the hundreds of passengers the cutters showed up, and helped to expedite matters by towing the small boats. Before breakfast time we had all the outfit aboard and away for New York. Hall and myself went aboard the cutter Eagle. We waited for several hours, to see if there were anything more to find drifting about, and then away we went for home, thanking the captain of the Nantucket Shoals lightship for what he had done.
"I don't understand it at all—don't seem to be just right," repeated Hall over and over to the captain of the cutter. "She just blew up—that's all there is to it. We had a drove of miners aboard, and you know how hard it is to keep those fellows from carrying explosives in their dunnage. You simply can't stop to search them. There was probably a couple of hundred pounds of blasting powder, at the least—went off like a mine blowing up a battleship. That bulkhead in the wake of the starboard engine room saved us—that's all!"
I was out of a ship. When we got in, the manager laid me off for a month, and then gave me the second greaser's berth on the old Prince Leander, a bum ship—and that's a fact. When I reached the other side again, I saw by the papers that a certain Frenchman had tried to collect nearly a million francs on his insurance for cargo and personal belongings in the Prince Gregory. It seems that he had shipped tons of expensive machinery and had insured it fully. The stuff was cased tightly, but one case marked for him had broken while being handled on the dock, and nothing but bricks fell out.