His legs were rigid, his body swayed, but his spirit was as staunch as the star that had guided him for fifty years through the trackless waste.
And while these doughty, desperate spirits fought the fire and smoke with every means at their command, down in the suffocating depths of the ship, braving not only the peril visible and at hand, but the prospect of annihilation in the event that a belated bomb projected its hideous force into the nest of high explosives,--while these men fought, the smiling, placid sea was alive with small white craft that bobbed in the gleaming sunlight, life-boats crowded to the gunwales with shuddering, bleak-eyed men, women and children waiting to pick up those who stayed behind, and who inevitably would be driven overboard by the resistless, conquering flames.
Cruising about at a safe distance from the menacing hull, these boats managed to rescue a few of the beings who had leaped overboard in the first mad panic of fear, but many there were who went down never to be seen again.

No boat was without its wounded--and its dead; no boat was without its stricken, anxious-eyed survivors who watched and prayed for the salvation of loved ones left behind.

With straining eyes they searched the surface of the sea, peered at the occupants of near and distant boats, stared at the scurrying figures on the decks of the smoking steamer, hoping,--always hoping,--and always sobbing out the endless prayer.
At last, as the sun sank below the blue-black horizon, exhausted, red-eyed, gasping men struggled up from the drenched, smothering interior of the ship, and hurled themselves, not into the sea, but prone upon the decks! They had conquered! The scattered, vagrant fires, attacked in their infancy, while still in the creeping stage, had been subdued.
Darkness fell.

A chill night air stole out of the east, stealthily trailing the sun.

Will-o'-the-wisp lights bespecked the sea, surrounding the black hulk that lay motionless in the center of the circle.