God help them
all!
CHAPTER V
THE KANSAS SUSTAINS A CHECK--
Once, in early days, when Courtenay was a middy an a destroyer, his
ship ran ashore on the Manacles. After a bump or two, and a noise like
the snapping of trees during a hurricane, the little vessel broke her
back, and the after part, with the engines, fell away into deep water.
Courtenay happened to be on the bridge; the forward half held intact,
so he and the other survivors clambered ashore at low water.
He waited now for the rending of plates, the tearing asunder of stanch
steel ribs and cross-beams, which should sound the knell of the ship's
last moments. But the _Kansas_ seemed to be in no hurry to fall in
pieces. She strained and groaned, and shook violently when a wave
pounded her; otherwise, she lay there like a beaten thing, oddly
resembling the living but almost unconscious men stretched on the
mattresses in the forward saloon.
Courtenay did not experience the least fear of death. Emotion of any
sort was already dead in him. He found himself wondering if an
unexpectedly strong current, setting to the southeast, had not upset
his reckoning--if there were any broken limbs among the occupants of
the saloon--if Elsie had been injured by being thrown down into his
cabin.
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