dress and undress rushed confusedly about the decks, praying, screaming, blaspheming and fighting.
In the emergency that had so suddenly arisen, the crew and officers of the ship seemed powerless to do anything. Instead of attempting to quiet the panic, they rushed about, apparently as maddened as the rest of the persons on the ship, by the dire peril that confronted them.
"The boats! The boats!" someone suddenly shouted, and a mad rush for the upper decks, on which the boats were swung, followed. Women were flung aside by cowardly men frenzied with terror.
"Here, I can't stand this!" shouted Ned, as, followed by Herc, he plunged toward the foot of the narrow stairway up which the frenzied passengers were fighting their way.
"Women and children first! Women and children first!" the Dreadnought Boy kept shouting, as he elbowed his way to the foot of the steps, closely trailed by Herc.
The roar of the flames was by this time deafening, drowning all other sounds. To add to the confusion, there now came pouring up from the lower regions of the ship a black and sooty crew – the firemen of the vessel. Maddened by fear and brutal by nature, the grimy stokers had little difficulty in shoving the weaker passengers aside and making their way to the foot of the stairway up which Ned and Herc were helping the women and children and keeping back the cowardly male passengers as best they could. They were not over gentle in doing this latter. It was no time for halfway measures.
Above them, the captain of the ship and two of his officers who had partially collected their wits, were directing the crew to lower the boats. The women and children were being placed in them as rapidly as possible as Ned and Herc passed them up.
"Can you hold them back?" the captain had shouted down to the boys a few minutes before, as he peered down at the struggling mass on the lower deck.
"We'll stick it out as long as we can," Ned had assured him, as he whirled a terrified male passenger about and sent him spinning backward whining pitifully that he "didn't want to die."
Suddenly Herc was confronted by a huge form, brandishing a steel spanner in a knotty fist.
It was one of the panic-stricken firemen.
"Let me by, kid!" bellowed this formidable antagonist.
"You can see for yourself that there are several women to go yet," responded Herc calmly, although he felt anything but easy in his mind as the muscular giant glared at him with terror and vindictiveness mingling in his gaze. "Women first, that's the rule."
"What in blazes do I care about the women?" roared the fireman, behind whom were now ranged several of his companions. "Let me by, or – "
He flourished the spanner with a suggestive motion anything but agreeable to Herc.
The red-headed boy gazed over in the direction in which he had last seen Ned.
There was no hope for help from that quarter, as a glance showed him. Ned was holding back an excited man with long whiskers and of prosperous appearance, who was shouting as if he were a phonograph:
"A thousand dollars for a seat in the boats! A thousand – two thousand dollars for a seat in the boats!"
Suddenly, so suddenly that Herc had not time to guard against it, the stokers made a concerted rush for him.
"Ned! Ned!" shouted the boy, as he felt himself borne down by overwhelming numbers and trampled underfoot.
Ned heard the cry, and in two leaps was in the midst of the scuffle, dealing and receiving blows right and left.
"Do you call yourselves men?" he shouted indignantly, as the stokers fought their way forward in a grim phalanx which there was no resisting.
"It's deuce take the hindmost, and every man for himself now!" shouted a voice in the crowd, and the cowardly mob elbowed forward through the few women that still remained on the stairway and its approaches.
Ned and Herc, who had by this time struggled to his feet, fought desperately to stem the tide. So effective were their blows that for a time they actually succeeded in checking the advance.
"Oh, for a gun!" breathed Ned.
"A cannon!" amended Herc.
Above them they heard a cheer, signifying that the first boat had struck the water.
"Stick it out, Herc!" panted Ned, as he struggled with a grimy giant, who, thanks to his ignorance of wrestling and tackles, was easily hurled backward by his lighter opponent. But the fight was too uneven to be of long duration.
Step by step, fighting every inch of the way, the two boys were borne backward by the opposing mob. Ned's foot caught in the lower step of the stairway and he was toppled over backward.
A mighty onrush of the fugitives immediately followed, and Herc shared Ned's fate.
The thought that they had failed flashed bitterly through each Dreadnought Boy's mind as they were trampled and crushed by hurrying feet of the terrified firemen, whose van was followed by the badly scared male passengers. The screams of the women who were being ruthlessly thrust aside tingled maddeningly in the boys' ears as they strove to regain their feet.
Suddenly, above all the noise of the fugitives and the crackling of the flames as they ate through the bulkheads about the engine-room hatchway, the boys heard a sharp command.
It rang out as incisively as the report of a rifle, in a voice that seemed used to implicit obedience:
"I'll shoot the next man up that stairway!"
The rush came to halt for a brief second, and in that time the boys scrambled to their feet.
They soon perceived the cause of the interruption.
Not far from them, garbed in his shirt and trousers, just as he had rushed from his cabin on awaking, stood the man who had occupied the neighboring cabin to theirs.
The flames illumined the grim compression of his lips beneath his gray mustache. His eyes were narrowed to a determined angle.
In his hand he held a blue-steel navy revolver on which the glare of the conflagration played glisteningly.
"Come on, boys!" roared the stoker who had threatened Herc with the spanner. "It's just a bluff!"
At his words, the spell that had fallen on the frightened crowd for a second seemed to be broken, and the rush recommenced. The boys, with horrified eyes, saw the giant stoker snatch up a woman with a child in her arms and hurl her brutally back into the crowd, where she disappeared, lost in the vortex of struggling humanity.
"Crack!"
There was a spit of vicious blue flame from the revolver, followed by a yell of pain from the giant stoker.
The boys saw the spanner fall from his upraised hand and tumble with a clatter at his feet. His wrist, shot through by the gray-mustached man's unerring aim, hung limp at his side.
Like frightened sheep suddenly checked in a stampede, the white-faced crowd came to a halt and faced about at the new peril.
"That's to show you I mean business!" grated out the marksman, in a voice as cold as chilled steel. "Now let the women go first, and then the men may follow."
Under that menacing weapon,
