Once the red sheet enveloped them for a flashing second, but the merciful wind came to save.  It could not last long, though.  Dan’s arm weakened about the limp form of the girl.  He closed his eyes and ground his teeth and brought new force to the encircling arm.  He glared down at the mass of soft hair scattering over his breast; he thought of that beautiful life and quite impersonally asked himself if all this beauty must die.  Where would all the beauty of the world be then?  This question ran deliriously through his mind.  Eh! where would it all be?  If they died together, would they wake together?  And the flames came again.

But as they swooped down with redoubled fury he saw almost subconsciously a great tangled litter of wreckage passing beneath him.  He uttered a little cry, and with the girl still in his arm he dropped from the ledge.  With a sigh of relief he felt the cooling, revivifying water, and the sharp, cold taste of brine in his mouth was like the touch of a new life.

Instinctively he had put his free arm around a section of cargo boom, with a grating caught in the twisted gear.  Upon this he pushed and lifted the half-unconscious girl.  Then he clambered astride the boom.  Thus they drifted, while Dan, his mind slowly clearing, struggled pitifully for full possession of his faculties.  He had a dull sense of pain, but the one dominant idea was the girl.  Leaning slightly over, he twisted his hand in the folds of her dress lest she slip into the waters.  The stars were paling; on the horizon were the first vague hints of dawn.  He gazed at the faint gray curtain with interest.  It was a dawn he had not expected to see, he told himself.

Then, as he looked, a shape arose before his eye out of the gloom.  Dan watched it with dumb fascination.  Suddenly a realizing sense of the nature of the apparition shot through his mind.  A vessel—­God!  Dan’s voice raised in a long, hoarse cry for assistance.  But there was no answer.  Yet the craft was bearing toward them, not a hundred yards away, silently as a ship of the dead.  Dan cried again, rising on his rolling perch.  But the hail died on his lips.  He could see now.  It was a ship of the dead.  It was the derelict they had viewed from the fancied security of the Tampico’s deck, a few short hours before.  An imprecation trembled upon Dan’s lips.  For the last half-hour Virginia, who had crawled to a kneeling posture, had been watching Dan with unlighted eyes.  Now as he turned to her and pointed at the slowly advancing vessel, she nodded slowly, as though comprehending his meaning, and stretched out her arms to him.

Softly, quietly the bow of the hulk slid up and nuzzled gently among the wreckage.  Quickly Dan secured the litter to the bow by twisting a length of wire cable through the rusty green fore-chains of the derelict.  Then gaining a footing in the mess of gear, he assisted the girl to her feet on the tottering grating, and placed her hand on the chains.