Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/288

  And then the clamor reached our deck, but forward, and we turned as one man and stepped out of the rook kamer. Abreast of the steam steering-gear there was a confused mass of yelling, gyrating figures, and from these we saw emerge a single one who with outspread arms and wide fingers came lurching toward us, and as he ran he screamed.

The bulk of my professional work has been of an emergency character, so that even as the man approached I was framing a diagnosis, and before he had reached the part of the deck where we stood, it was made. The jar of the explosion, the screams of appalling pain, and now, swiftly as he approached, the suffocating fumes of ammonia had preceded him, and I knew on the instant that there had been an explosion of the ice-making machine and that the victim was one who had bathed in the liquid fire set loose. Then as he bore down upon us, followed by the clamoring crowd who sought to restrain him for his good, something of the spirit of the hunted animal [ 272 ]