and deadened their powers of reasoning. Even the skipper felt the blind
terror of the encounter in every tingling nerve. The water was deep, the
deck sloped beneath their feet, and the way to the flooded steps of the
companionway seemed a mile long. The fellows who suffered the touch of
those dead elbows that seemed to reach out to them beneath the churning
water yelled wildly, lost their footing and power to advance at one and
the same moment, and soused under, clutching blindly at their comrades.
This brought others down and under who believed that the fingers
gripping them were those of the poor corpse. Screams and yells filled
the cabin and drifted up to the astounded men on the cliff. Heads
vanished; legs and arms beat the imprisoned water to spume; fists and
feet struck living flesh; and one poor, frantic fool clutched the
unconscious cause of all this madness in his arms. Then the skipper,
steadied from his first insanity of fear by the signs of disaster,
lowered his head deliberately, plunged forward and downward, and swam
under water for the companion. In his passage he wrenched floundering
bodies aside and kicked and struck at floundering legs and arms. Coming
to the surface and sinking his feet to the deck at the same moment, he
grasped a step of the companionway and hauled himself out of the water,
as if the devil were nipping at his heels. Turning on an upper step, he
reached down, clutched two of the struggling fellows by the collars and
dragged them up from the battling smother. One of them sprang on up the
companion without so much as a glance at his rescuer, reached the deck
with a yell, and started forward on the run without pausing to lay a
hand on the life-line. His course was brief. The list of the deck
carried him to the starboard. His foot caught in a splinter of shattered
bulwark and he pitched overboard, head first and with terrific force, to
the black rocks and surging seas. That was the last time Dan Cormick was
seen alive--and the sight of him springing from the companion and
plunging to his death struck horror and amazement to the souls of the