Creeping up from below, thanking God that the hatch had not yet been closed, feeling his way by his hands and gradually reaching the wheel--buffeted here and there; knocked down once, then up again--Gilbert Bampfyld crept to his side, and, an instant later, was fingering and, next, gripping the spokes. 'Let me help you!' he roared, so as to be heard, while feeling as he did so which way the other man who already had hold of the wheel was exerting his force. 'Blind as I am, I can do that. Who are you?' 'Stephen Charke,' the other answered, also shrieking his name. 'Help, if you like. But it is useless. We are going.' 'I know it,' Gilbert answered. 'Well! we will go down standing.' And Charke, still endeavouring to hold up the ship, still to protract life from one moment to another, muttering inwardly: 'Curse him! he is a man. One worthy of her.' Then, unceasingly, he continued his work, wrenching, striving, endeavouring in every way to save the ship from being pooped or flung over as the waves took her and cast her up like a ball, or hurled her down like a falling house into the gaping, hellish troughs that lay below, yawning for their victim. But still the lightning played upon the doomed craft, illuminating her from stem to stern, showing the fore top-gallant mast gone and the jib-boom carried away, broken off short, three feet from the bowsprit head. Also it showed something else--something that, had he had time to think of aught but preventing the ship from falling off the course he was endeavouring to steer, might have struck a feeling of wild horror to his uncanny breast. For some of the blind, stricken men forward had crept by now out of the forecastle and other places where they had herded, and were crawling about the foredeck, holding on to whatever they could clutch--belaying-pins, the fife-rail, the racks, even the ring-bolts. Amongst them, too, was the tiger-cub, an almost unrecognisable lump, except for the topaz gleam which his eyes emitted: a gleam that, as a sea, which was in truth a cataract, washed it from the foremast almost to where he stood, appeared to Charke malignant, devilish, threatening. And he heard those unhappy men's voices, cursing, blaspheming, praying: roaring that they feared no death which they could see, but that they wanted to go neither to heaven nor hell enveloped in utter darkness. 'No Jack who ever sailed,' they screamed, 'feared a death that he could face, but we fear this. And if we had but our sight, maybe there'd be no death at all!'