arm; he said among other things, and with no lack of forceful adjectives, that if he could only come to close quarters with some of the Portygee assassins on the island he would tear their sanguinary livers out. It is an odd thing that men made animal by fury often use that trope. They do really mean it. The liver is the earliest spoil of the successful tiger. The _Andromeda_, uncontrollable as destiny, and quite as heedless of her human freight, swung round with the current until her bows pointed to the islet occupied by the marksmen. All at once, Coke suspended his flow of invectives and rushed into the chart-room, where Iris heard him tearing lockers open and throwing their contents on the deck. To enter, he was obliged to leap over the body of the dying man. The action was grotesque, callous, almost inhuman; it jarred the girl's agonized transports back into a species of spiritual calm, a mental state akin to the fatalism often exhibited by Asiatics when death is imminent and not to be denied. The apparent madness of the captain was now more distressing to her than the certain loss of the ship or the invisible missiles that clanged into white patches on the iron plates, cut sudden holes and scars in the woodwork, or whirred through the air with a buzzing whistle of singularly menacing sound. She began to be afraid of remaining on the bridge; her fear was not due to the really vital fact that it was so exposed; it arose from the purely feminine consideration that she was sure Coke had become a raving maniac, and she dreaded meeting him when, if ever, he reappeared. A bullet struck the front frame of the chart-room, and several panes of glass were shattered with a fearful din. That decided her. Coke, if he were not killed, would surely be driven out. She sprang to her feet, and literally ran down the steep ladder to the saloon deck. Through the open door of the officers' mess she witnessed another bizarre act--an act quite as extraordinary in its way as Coke's jump over the steersman's body. In the midst of this drama of death and destruction, Watts was standing there, with head thrown back and uplifted arm, gulping down a tumblerful of some dark-colored liquid, draining it to the dregs, while he held a black bottle in the other hand. That a man should fly to rum for solace when existence itself might be measured by minutes or seconds, was, to Iris, not the least amazing experience of an episode crammed with all that was new, and strange, and horrible in her life. She raced on, wholly unaware that the drifting ship was now presenting her port bow to the death-dealing fusillade. Then, from somewhere, she heard a gruff voice: "Hev' ye shut off steam, Macfarlane?" "Ou ay. It's a' snug below till the watter reaches the furnaces," came the answer.