‘Sure,’ says the Operator in the _Cornucopia_. ‘We’re doing what we’ve never done at sea before in heavy weather. We’re touching within a knot of our “trials” speed—we’re doing twenty-four and a half knots; and we’re doing it against _this_! Honour bright, old man! I’ll not deceive you at a time like this. I never saw anything like what we’re doing. All the engineers are in the engine-room, and all the officers are on the boat-deck, overhauling the boats and gear. We’ve got those new forty-foot boat derricks, and we can shove a boat into the water with ’em, with the ship rolling half under. The Old Man’s on the bridge; and I guess you’re just going to be saved all right.... You ought to hear us! I tell you, man, she’s just welting the seas to a pulp, and skating along to you on the top of them.’ The Operator is right. The great ship seems alive to-night, along all her shapely eight hundred feet of marvellous, honest, beautiful steel. Her enormous bows take the seas as on a horn, and hurl them roaring into screaming drifts of foam. She is singing a song, fore and aft, and the thunder of her grey steel flanks is stupendous, as she spurns the mutilated seas and the gale and the bleak intolerable miles into her wake. * * * * * The second and third hours pass, and part of the fourth, in an intermittent thunder of speed. And the speed has been further increased; for now the Leviathan is laying the miles astern, twenty-nine in each hour; her sides drunken with black water and spume—a dripping, league-conquering, fifty-thousand-ton shape of steel and steam and brains, going like some stupendous Angel of Help across the black Desolation of the night. * * * * * Incredibly far away, down on the black horizons of the night, there shows a faint red glow. There is shouting along the bridge. ‘There she is!’ goes the word fore and aft. ‘There she is!’ Meanwhile the wireless messages pulse across the darkness: The fire is burning with terrible fury. The fore-part of the _Vanderfield’s_ iron skin is actually glowing red-hot in places. Despair is seizing everyone. Will the coming _Cornucopia_ never, never come? The young Operators talk, using informal words: ‘Look out to the South of you, for our searchlight,’ replies the man in the wireless-room of the _Cornucopia_. ‘The Old Man’s going to play it against the clouds, to let you see we’re coming. Tell ’em all to look out for it. It’ll cheer them up. We’re walking along through the smother like an express. Man! Man! we’re doing our “trials” speed, twenty-five and a half knots, _against this_. Do you realise it—_against this_! Look along to the South. Now!’ * * * * *