All the passengers were off.  Under the mist the sea rose and fell quietly; the boats and rafts had drawn off to a safe distance.  The Greek, who had humour as well as imagination, kept up the spirits of those about him while he held a child in his arms.

“Shall we,” he inquired gravely, “think you—­shall we pay extra to the company for this excursion?”

* * * * *

The battle below had been fought and lost.  It was of minutes now.  The Chief had given the order:  “Every one for himself!” Some of the men had gone, climbing to outer safety.  The two Seconds had refused to leave the Chief.  All lights were off by that time.  The after stokehole was flooded and water rolled sickeningly in the engine-pits.  Each second it seemed the ship must take its fearful dive into the quiet sea that so insistently reached up for her.  With infinite labour the Seconds got the Chief up to the fiddley, twenty feet or less out of a hundred, and straight ladders instead of a steel staircase.  Ten men could not have lifted him without gear, and there was not time!

Then, because the rest was hopeless, they left him there, propped against the wall, with the lantern beside him.  He shook hands with them; the Junior was crying; the Senior went last, and after he had gone up a little way he turned and came back.

“I can’t do it, Chief!” he said.  “I’ll stick it out with you.”  But the Chief drove him up, with the name of his wife and child.  Far up the shaft he turned and looked down.  The lantern glowed faintly below.

The Chief sat alone on his grating.  He was faint with pain.  The blistering cylinders were growing cold; the steel floor beneath was awash.  More ominous still, as the ship’s head sank, came crackings and groanings from the engines below.  They would fall through at the last, ripping out the bulkheads and carrying her down bow first.

Pain had made the Chief rather dull. “‘I ha’ lived and I ha’ worked!’” he said several times—­and waited for the end.  Into his stupor came the thought of the woman—­and another thought of the Red Un.  Both of them had sold him out, so to speak; but the woman had grown up with his heart and the boy was his by right of salvage—­only he thought of the woman as he dreamed of her, not as he had seen her on the deck.  He grew rather confused, after a time, and said:  “I ha’ loved and I ha’ worked!”

Just between life and death there comes a time when the fight seems a draw, or as if each side, exhausted, had called a truce.  There is no more struggle, but it is not yet death.  The ship lay so.  The upreaching sea had not conquered.  The result was inevitable, but not yet.  And in the pause the Red Un came back, came crawling down the ladder, his indomitable spirit driving his craven little body.

He had got as far as the boat and safety.  The gripping devils of fear that had followed him up from the engine room still hung to his throat; but once on deck, with the silent men who were working against time and eternity, he found he could not do it.  He was the Chief’s boy—­and the Chief was below and hurt!