Ward and Skipper Simms had been among the first to seek the precarious safety below deck.  Theriere alone of the officers had remained on duty until the last, and now he was exerting his every faculty in the effort to save as many of the men as possible without losing the ship in the doing of it.  Only between waves was the entrance to the main cabins negotiable, while the forecastle hatch had been abandoned entirely after it had with difficulty been replaced following the retreat of three of the crew to that part of the ship.

The mucker stood beside Theriere as the latter beat back the men when the seas threatened.  It was the man’s first experience of the kind.  Never had he faced death in the courage-blighting form which the grim harvester assumes when he calls unbridled Nature to do his ghastly bidding.  The mucker saw the rough, brawling bullies of the forecastle reduced to white-faced, gibbering cowards, clawing and fighting to climb over one another toward the lesser danger of the cabins, while the mate fought them off, except as he found it expedient to let them pass him; he alone cool and fearless.

Byrne stood as one apart from the dangers and hysteric strivings of his fellows.  Once when Theriere happened to glance in his direction the Frenchman mentally ascribed the mucker’s seeming lethargy to the paralysis of abject cowardice.  “The fellow is in a blue funk,” thought the second mate; “I did not misjudge him—­like all his kind he is a coward at heart.”

Then a great wave came, following unexpectedly close upon the heels of a lesser one.  It took Theriere off his guard, threw him down and hurtled him roughly across the deck, landing him in the scuppers, bleeding and stunned.  The next wave would carry him overboard.

Released from surveillance the balance of the crew pushed and fought their way into the cabin—­only the mucker remained without, staring first at the prostrate form of the mate and then at the open cabin hatch.  Had one been watching him he might reasonably have thought that the man’s mind was in a muddle of confused thoughts and fears; but such was far from the case.  Billy was waiting to see if the mate would revive sufficiently to return across the deck before the next wave swept the ship.  It was very interesting—­he wondered what odds O’Leary would have laid against the man.

In another moment the wave would come.  Billy glanced at the open cabin hatch.  That would never do—­the cabin would be flooded with tons of water should the next wave find the hatch still open.  Billy closed it.  Then he looked again toward Theriere.  The man was just recovering consciousness—­and the wave was coming.

Something stirred within Billy Byrne.  It gripped him and made him act quickly as though by instinct to do something that no one, Billy himself least of all, would have suspected that the Grand Avenue mucker would have been capable of.