Barry seized Revere by the collar and threw him violently far from him. The young man pitched downward and fell headlong on the grass in the direction of the two women. The ground sloped abruptly away toward the water on that side of the ship. In that same instant the sailor threw up two great arms and caught the impending ship. He took the place of the quivering, buckling, sliding oaken timber. For a second he stood there in mighty majesty, a pillar of strength and resolution, a tower of flesh and blood, sustaining a ship-of-the-line, a human stanchion, magnificent in the frenzied, awful expression of a power superhuman. Rigid, unbreakable, indomitable, he shored up the ship,--Atlas holding the world! "Go!" he gasped. Revere, who had risen instantly, stepped toward him as if to assist him. "Go! Can't hold----" It had come. Angry at the momentary check, the ship fell upon the man as an avalanche falls upon the mountain. Beneath it the mighty knees were bowing, the stubborn back bending, the great arms trembling. Revere sprang backward and slipped far down the slope. As he fell he caught sight of burning eyes from a face white as the sea-froth, of lips set and bloodless, of jaws clinched, of sweat standing upon a bronzed forehead--picture impressed upon his soul forever! There was a mighty roaring, detonating crash and all was over. Crushed were the mighty arms, beaten down the massive shoulders, broken the iron knees. The life of the man went out in the fall, and the blood of his heart rippled along the blocks of the keel. With a concussion like the discharge of a battery, the mighty war-monster collapsed into a shapeless mass of timber, burying beneath it the man who had loved it best. The ship that had been his own was nothing but a heap of ruins above his still heart. A cloud of dust rose and hung over the wreck in the quiet air. War was to have been the trade of that ship-of-the-line. Blood should have run upon her white decks, death she should have dealt out and received, great battles should have made her famous, heroic men should have written her name eternally on the red pages of her country's history. Now it was finished; and yet, in the ending at least, there had been a slight fulfilment of her destiny--to kill. No struggle could have been more superb than the quiet one just over; no effort more magnificent, no conflict more terrible, than that between the man and the ship. No ship had ever claimed a nobler victim than Barry, after all, and no fate could have been more fitting than that which had come to man and ship together in the end. The old war-vessel had lived through the still ages of peace, had survived the long period of decay, had endured the disintegrating assaults of time, only to accomplish her manifest purpose of destruction as she fell. And the hand that had loved her was the hand that had laid her low! With dreadful feelings in their hearts, the three stood looking at the ruins of the ship.