The room around the riverboat’s boiler begins to shake violently as the engine is pushed beyond its limits. James asks Brock what the repeated bell signals mean, but Brock does not know because he has never heard more than four bells before. Norman questions why the boat is moving so fast, and James bluntly says the pilot is crazy.

Brock then notices the way James is speaking to Norman and realizes something is wrong with their supposed master-slave relationship. When Norman says that he is not a white man, Brock is stunned, and James tries to calm him before the conversation can go further. At that moment, the machinery grows even more unstable: the rattling intensifies, the boiler screams, the pipes hiss, the shaft appears to buckle, and a rivet shoots loose and nearly kills Norman.

Brock looks at the engine and immediately understands the danger. The drive shaft seizes completely, and Brock’s reaction shows that disaster is unavoidable. The next thing James knows, he is regaining consciousness in freezing water, which reveals that the riverboat has exploded or broken apart and thrown everyone into the river.

In the water, James is surrounded by wreckage, panicked survivors, and dead bodies. He is injured, with a badly burned shoulder and pain flaring across the scars on his back. As he searches for Norman, James instead sees both Norman and Huck alive but separated from each other, each about the same distance away and each calling desperately for him while struggling to stay afloat. The chapter ends with James paralyzed by the need to choose whom to try to save.