At that moment the skipper pulled the narrow door open to its full extent.  The water inside swirled out to fill the eddy made by the opening of the door; and then, slow, terrible, wide-eyed, floating breast-high in the flood, a woman drifted out of the narrow room into the midst of the expectant men.  Death had not been able to hide the agony in her staring eyes, or dull the lines of horror in her waxen, contorted face.  She floated out to them, swaying and bowing, one hand clutched and fixed in the torn bosom of her dress, a pendant of gold and pearl swinging from each ear.

A groan of wordless horror went up from the wreckers.  For a moment they stared at the thing rocking and sidling in their midst, with grotesque motions of life and the face and hands of a terrific death; and then, as one man, they started to splash, beat and plunge their way to the companion-steps.  The water was set swirling by their frantic efforts, in eddies and cross-currents which caught the dead woman and drew her, pitching and turning heavily, in the wakes of the leaders and elbow to elbow with some of the panic-stricken fellows in the second line of retreat.  They knew the thing was not a ghost; they knew the thing was not alive, and could not harm them with its pitiful, stiff fingers; they knew it for the body of a woman who had been drowned in her cabin—­and yet the horror of it chilled them, maddened them, melted their courage 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