When the boys came down into the main saloon of the Boreas, they saw a pitiful sight and heard a world of pitiful sounds. Eleven poor creatures lay dead and forty more lay moaning, or pleading or screaming, while a score of Good Samaritans moved among them doing what they could to relieve their sufferings; bathing their chinless faces and bodies with linseed oil and lime water and covering the places with bulging masses of raw cotton that gave to every face and form a dreadful and unhuman aspect.
A little wee French midshipman of fourteen lay fearfully injured, but never uttered a sound till a physician of Memphis was about to dress his hurts. Then he said:
“Can I get well? You need not be afraid to tell me.”
“Then do not waste your time with me--help those that can get well.”
“Help those that can get well! It is, not for me to be a girl. I carry the blood of eleven generations of soldiers in my veins!”
The physician--himself a man who had seen service in the navy in his time--touched his hat to this little hero, and passed on.
The head engineer of the Amaranth, a grand specimen of physical manhood, struggled to his feet a ghastly spectacle and strode toward his brother, the second engineer, who was unhurt. He said:
“You were on watch. You were boss. You would not listen to me when I begged you to reduce your steam. Take that!--take it to my wife and tell her it comes from me by the hand of my murderer! Take it--and take my curse with it to blister your heart a hundred years--and may you live so long!”
And he tore a ring from his finger, stripping flesh and skin with it, threw it down and fell dead!
But these things must not be dwelt upon. The Boreas landed her dreadful cargo at the next large town and delivered it over to a multitude of eager hands and warm southern hearts--a cargo amounting by this time to 39 wounded persons and 22 dead bodies. And with these she delivered a list of 96 missing persons that had drowned or otherwise perished at the scene of the disaster.
A jury of inquest was impaneled, and after due deliberation and inquiry they returned the inevitable American verdict which has been so familiar to our ears all the days of our lives--“NOBODY TO BLAME.”
**[The incidents of the explosion are not invented. They happened just as they are told.--The Authors.]