Page:The Great Secret.djvu/105

Rh dismally amongst the rigging and cut their faces like knives, so keen and raw it was, while the rollers broke against their bows with thundering crashes that swallowed up all other sounds. Still the captain was easy in his mind as he sat below, drank his wine, and puffed his cigarette, for, according to his reckoning, they were two days from their destination, and ploughing an open sea.

All at once their doom came upon them, almost with the suddenness of the explosion that had given them the ship. The engines going full speed, the diners below laughing or listening to the dubious jokes. The women playing the wantons, the men feigning to be charmed with those stale old tricks, the men on the bridge and at the wheel wishing their watch was over, and the crowd of refugees hiding below. It came with a smash, as when two steam-engines meet, and the noble Rockhampton was a total wreck in a second of time, while the people were scattered in all directions.

Down in the engine-rooms, three of the men acting as engineers were pitched headlong amongst the machinery and broken in pieces, their bones crushed, and their flesh torn out of all semblance of humanity before they had time to realise that the vessel had struck. Below, in the stoking hells, the 'seedy' boys were being roasted to death. The men on the bridge and at the wheel were chucked, like bits of wood, over the side and into the boiling wash.

They had been making twenty knots an hour when tilted against those adamantine rocks, and still the engines were going, with no one to stop or turn them, urging the poor ship onwards where there was no way except destruction. Still the snow fell thickly and hid the death-dealing cliffs, while the winds shrieked, and