"You are wrong," says another man, crouching beside him who first spoke. "It has not stopped--it is still rising."
"_What_! I tell you it _has_ stopped," snaps the other. "Look at that step! It stopped right below it."
"_You've been watching the wrong step_. It's rising!"
"You fool! Shut your mouth! I say it has _stopped_."
"Look at _that_ step, then! See the water just now coming over it."
The obstinate optimist stares a moment, turns pale, and then, with an oath, strikes his more clear-headed neighbor in the face! And the excited crowd behind, with the blind instinctive feeling that, somehow, he has robbed them of the hope which was but now as the breath of life to them, strike him and curse him, too.
With the steady march of fate--two inches a minute, as Cosmo Versál had accurately measured it--the water still advances and climbs upward.
In a little while they were driven to another story, and then to another. But hope would not down. They could not believe that the glad news, which had so recently filled them with joy, was altogether false. The water _must_ have stopped rising _once_; it had been _seen_. Then, it would surely stop _again_, stop to rise no more.
Poor deluded creatures! With the love of life so strong within them, they could not picture, in their affrighted minds, the terrible consummation to which they were being slowly driven, when, jammed into the narrow chambers at the very top of the mighty structure, their remorseless enemy would seize them at last.
But they were nearer the end than they could have imagined even if they had accepted and coolly reasoned upon the facts that were so plain before them. And, after all, it was not to come upon them only after they had fought their way to the highest loft and into the last corner.
A link of this strange chain of fatal events now carries us to the spot where the United States Navy Yard in Brooklyn once existed. That place was sunk deep beneath the waters. All of the cruisers, battleships, and other vessels that had been at anchor or at moorings there had gone under. One only, the boast of the American navy, the unconquerable _Uncle Sam_, which, in the last great war that the world had known, had borne the starry flag to victories whose names broke men's voices and filled their eyes with tears of pride, had escaped, through the incomparable seamanship of Captain Robert Decatur, who had been her commander for thirty years.