The little cabin boy thought he would die from fright.  In a second he was wide awake.  Then he discovered that a large sailing vessel had collided with the steamer.  He saw great sails and a strange deck, where men in oilskin coats were rushing about in mad terror.  The wind freshened, and the sails became as taut as drums.  The masts bulged, while the yards snapped with a succession of reports that sounded like pistol shots.  A great three-master, which in the dense fog had sailed straight into L’Univers, had somehow got her bowsprit wedged into the side of the liner, and could not free herself.  The passenger steamer listed considerably, but its propellers went right on working, so that now both ships moved along together.

“Lord God!” exclaimed the cabin boy as he rushed out on deck, “that poor boat has run into us, and now it will surely sink!”

It never occurred to him that the steamer could be imperilled, big and fine as she was.  The officers came hurrying up; but when they saw it was only a sailing vessel that had collided with their ship, they felt quite safe, and with the utmost confidence took the necessary steps for getting the boats clear of each other.

The little cabin boy stood on the deck barelegged, his shirt fluttering in the wind, and beckoned to the unhappy men on the sailing vessel to come over to the steamer and save themselves.  At first no one seemed to take any notice of him, but presently a big man with a red beard began motioning to him.

“Come over here, boy!” the man shouted, running to the side of the vessel.  “The steamer is sinking!”

The little boy had not the faintest notion of going over to the sailing vessel.  He shouted as loud as he could that the people on the doomed boat should come over to L’Univers, and save their lives.

While the other men on the three-master were working with poles and boat hooks to free their vessel from the steamer, the man with the red beard could think of nothing but the little cabin boy, for whom he had evidently conceived an extraordinary pity.  He put his hands to his mouth, trumpet-like, and called:  “Come over here, come over here!”

The little lad looked forlorn and cold, standing on the deck in his thin shirt.  He stamped his foot and shook his fist at the men on the other boat, because they would not mind him and board the steamer.  A huge greyhound like L’Univers, with six hundred passengers and a crew of two hundred men, couldn’t possibly go down, he reasoned.  And, of course, he could see that both the captain and the sailors were just as calm as he was.

Of a sudden the man with the red beard seized a boat hook, thrust it out toward the boy, got him by the shirt, and tried to pull him on to the other ship.  The boy was dragged as far as the ship’s railing, but there he managed to free himself of the hook.  He was not going to let himself be dragged over to a strange vessel that was doomed.