No smoke issued from her stacks to cheer the wretched watchers; no foam, no spray leaped from her mighty bow.

She was a great, lifeless thing.

Waves lapped gently against her sides and fell away only to come back again in playful scorn for the vast object that had rent and baffled them so long.

On high fluttered the Stars and Stripes, gay in the presence of death, a sprightly harbinger of hope flaunting defiance in the face of despair.
Men, stripped to the waist, grimy and shining with the sweat of hours, moving about in knots of three and four--always in knots of three or four as if afraid to disintegrate--leaned upon the rail and watched the approach of the crowded boats, looked down into pallid, anguished faces with their eager, hungry eyes, eyes that devoured the groups along the rail.

Now and then a glad shout of joy went up from one of the boats, and a figure in the huddled mass was transformed into a responsive thing of life.
In each of the square, black openings in the hull of the ship stood men with ropes and ladders.