This it was, the screaming of the women, that most tried my nerves.
It must have tried, too, the nerves of the red-faced man, for I
have another picture which will never fade from my mind.  The stout
gentleman is stuffing the magazine into his overcoat pocket and
looking on curiously.  A tangled mass of women, with drawn, white
faces and open mouths, is shrieking like a chorus of lost souls;
and the red-faced man, his face now purplish with wrath, and with
arms extended overhead as in the act of hurling thunderbolts, is
shouting, "Shut up!  Oh, shut up!"

I remember the scene impelled me to sudden laughter, and in the
next instant I realized I was becoming hysterical myself; for these
were women of my own kind, like my mother and sisters, with the
fear of death upon them and unwilling to die.  And I remember that
the sounds they made reminded me of the squealing of pigs under the
knife of the butcher, and I was struck with horror at the vividness
of the analogy.  These women, capable of the most sublime emotions,
of the tenderest sympathies, were open-mouthed and screaming.  They
wanted to live, they were helpless, like rats in a trap, and they
screamed.

The horror of it drove me out on deck.  I was feeling sick and
squeamish, and sat down on a bench.  In a hazy way I saw and heard
men rushing and shouting as they strove to lower the boats.  It was
just as I had read descriptions of such scenes in books.  The
tackles jammed.  Nothing worked.  One boat lowered away with the
plugs out, filled with women and children and then with water, and
capsized.  Another boat had been lowered by one end, and still hung
in the tackle by the other end, where it had been abandoned.
Nothing was to be seen of the strange steamboat which had caused
the disaster, though I heard men saying that she would undoubtedly
send boats to our assistance.

I descended to the lower deck.  The Martinez was sinking fast, for
the water was very near.  Numbers of the passengers were leaping
overboard.  Others, in the water, were clamouring to be taken
aboard again.  No one heeded them.  A cry arose that we were
sinking.  I was seized by the consequent panic, and went over the
side in a surge of bodies.  How I went over I do not know, though I
did know, and instantly, why those in the water were so desirous of
getting back on the steamer.  The water was cold - so cold that it
was painful.  The pang, as I plunged into it, was as quick and
sharp as that of fire.  It bit to the marrow.  It was like the grip
of death.  I gasped with the anguish and shock of it, filling my
lungs before the life-preserver popped me to the surface.  The
taste of the salt was strong in my mouth, and I was strangling with
the acrid stuff in my throat and lungs.

But it was the cold that was most distressing.  I felt that I could
survive but a few minutes.  People were struggling and floundering
in the water about me.  I could hear them crying out to one
another.  And I heard, also, the sound of oars.  Evidently the
strange steamboat had lowered its boats.  As the time went by I
marvelled that I was still alive.  I had no sensation whatever in
my lower limbs, while a chilling numbness was wrapping about my
heart and creeping into it.  Small waves, with spiteful foaming
crests, continually broke over me and into my mouth, sending me off
into more strangling paroxysms.

The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing
chorus of screams in the distance, and knew that the Martinez had
gone down.  Later, - how much later I have no knowledge, - I came
to myself with a start of fear.  I was alone.  I could hear no
calls or cries - only the sound of the waves, made weirdly hollow
and reverberant by the fog.  A panic in a crowd, which partakes of
a sort of community of interest, is not so terrible as a panic when
one is by oneself; and such a panic I now suffered.  Whither was I
drifting?  The red-faced man had said that the tide was ebbing
through the Golden Gate.  Was I, then, being carried out to sea?
And the life-preserver in which I floated?  Was it not liable to go
to pieces at any moment?  I had heard of such things being made of
paper and hollow rushes which quickly became saturated and lost all
buoyancy.  And I could not swim a stroke.  And I was alone,
floating, apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness.
I confess that a madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the
women had shrieked, and beat the water with my numb hands.

How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness
intervened, of which I remember no more than one remembers of
troubled and painful sleep.  When I aroused, it was as after
centuries of time; and I saw, almost above me and emerging from the
fog, the bow of a vessel, and three triangular sails, each shrewdly
lapping the other and filled with wind.  Where the bow cut the
water there was a great foaming and gurgling, and I seemed directly
in its path.  I tried to cry out, but was too exhausted.  The bow
plunged down, just missing me and sending a swash of water clear
over my head.  Then the long, black side of the vessel began
slipping past, so near that I could have touched it with my hands.
I tried to reach it, in a mad resolve to claw into the wood with my
nails, but my arms were heavy and lifeless.  Again I strove to call
out, but made no sound.

The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a
hollow between the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing
at the wheel, and of another man who seemed to be doing little else
than smoke a cigar.  I saw the smoke issuing from his lips as he
slowly turned his head and glanced out over the water in my
direction.  It was a careless, unpremeditated glance, one of those
haphazard things men do when they have no immediate call to do
anything in particular, but act because they are alive and must do
something.

But life and death were in that glance.  I could see the vessel
being swallowed up in the fog; I saw the back of the man at the
wheel, and the head of the other man turning, slowly turning, as
his gaze struck the water and casually lifted along it toward me.
His face wore an absent expression, as of deep thought, and I
became afraid that if his eyes did light upon me he would
nevertheless not see me.  But his eyes did light upon me, and
looked squarely into mine; and he did see me, for he sprang to the
wheel, thrusting the other man aside, and whirled it round and
round, hand over hand, at the same time shouting orders of some
sort.  The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its former
course and leapt almost instantly from view into the fog.

I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the
power of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and
darkness that was rising around me.  A little later I heard the
stroke of oars, growing nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man.
When he was very near I heard him crying, in vexed fashion, "Why in
hell don't you sing out?"  This meant me, I thought, and then the
blankness and darkness rose over me.

CHAPTER II

I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness.
Sparkling points of light spluttered and shot past me.  They were
stars, I knew, and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the
suns.  As I reached the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back
on the counter swing, a great gong struck and thundered.  For an
immeasurable period, lapped in the rippling of placid centuries, I
enjoyed and pondered my tremendous flight.

But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told
myself it must be.  My rhythm grew shorter and shorter.  I was
jerked from swing to counter swing with irritating haste.  I could
scarcely catch my breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the
heavens.  The gong thundered more frequently and more furiously.  I
grew to await it with a nameless dread.  Then it seemed as though I
were being dragged over rasping sands, white and hot in the sun.
This gave place to a sense of intolerable anguish.  My skin was
scorching in the torment of fire.  The gong clanged and knelled.
The sparkling points of light flashed past me in an interminable
stream, as though the whole sidereal system were dropping into the
void.  I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened my eyes.
Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me.  My mighty rhythm
was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea.  The terrific
gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and
clattered with each leap of the ship.  The rasping, scorching sands
were a man's hard hands chafing my naked chest.  I squirmed under
the pain of it, and half lifted my head.  My chest was raw and red,
and I could see tiny blood globules starting through the torn and
inflamed cuticle.

"That'll do, Yonson," one of the men said.  "Carn't yer see you've
bloomin' well rubbed all the gent's skin orf?"

The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type,
ceased chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet.  The man who
had spoken to him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and
weakly pretty, almost effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed
the sound of Bow Bells with his mother's milk.  A draggled muslin
cap on his head and a dirty gunny-sack about his slim hips
proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty ship's galley in which I
found myself.

"An' 'ow yer feelin' now, sir?" he asked, with the subservient
smirk which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors.

For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped
by Yonson to my feet.  The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was
grating horribly on my nerves.  I could not collect my thoughts.
Clutching the woodwork of the galley for support, - and I confess
the grease with which it was scummed put my teeth on edge, - I
reached across a hot cooking-range to the offending utensil,
unhooked it, and wedged it securely into the coal-box.

The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my
hand a steaming mug with an "'Ere, this'll do yer good."  It was a
nauseous mess, - ship's coffee, - but the heat of it was
revivifying.  Between gulps of the molten stuff I glanced down at
my raw and bleeding chest and turned to the Scandinavian.

"Thank you, Mr. Yonson," I said; "but don't you think your measures
were rather heroic?"

It was because he understood the reproof of my action, rather than
of my words, that he held up his palm for inspection.  It was
remarkably calloused.  I passed my hand over the horny projections,
and my teeth went on edge once more from the horrible rasping
sensation produced.

"My name is Johnson, not Yonson," he said, in very good, though
slow, English, with no more than a shade of accent to it.

There was mild protest in his pale blue eyes, and withal a timid
frankness and manliness that quite won me to him.

"Thank you, Mr. Johnson," I corrected, and reached out my hand for
his.