"Right O!" was his answer and he took off his coat and threw it away, accepting his task.
The glow of a man who would be obeyed was on Lavelle's brow. Men knew he spoke with the voice of authority and heeded it. They saw the purser refuse to hold the gangway in the social hall beside the fair-faced man and they saw Lavelle smash him to the deck with a blow of his fist.
Looking up from the deck below Emily Granville saw this, too, and, terrified, fled from succoring hands. She saw only a fiend at work.
"Twenty minutes! No longer! Lights—ten minutes!" shouted the quartermaster struggling to his side.
"What about the steerage?"
"Gone like rats! Whole bow's gone!"
He pantomimed him to take charge of a boat forward on the starboard side. A grimy engineer came through the crowd and reported. Others came and accepted his mastership—men who needed but to be told what to do to find their bearings and run in them.
Like a flame he moved upon that deck. Who he might be few knew, but wheresoever he went disorder became order and the spirits of brave men grew stronger and smiled at death as upon a friend. Like another self—the shadow of the flame—there moved Chang whither he went, striking as he struck and lifting up as he lifted up.
Of a sudden Lavelle saw Emily Granville standing in the port gangway of the smoke-room house, alone, hesitant, terror-stricken. She saw him and as he ran to her with open arms she drew back and then, remembering that he had but turned away from a boat in which she had seen him put a little girl, who cried that God must be upon the sea, she paused in her flight.
In that instant the guards whom Lavelle had stationed there were swept away by a yellow horde from below. It burst out of the gangway and engulfed him in its tide.