"

These words alarmed the mate. "Curse it all!" he cried; "the fool has
been and got some more rum. Fifty guineas to the man that will shin up
the tow-rope and throw that madman into the sea; then we can pick him up.
He swims like a cork."

A sailor instantly darted forward to the rope. But, unfortunately, Hudson
heard this proposal, and it enraged him. He got to his cutlass. The
sailor drew the boat under the ship's stern, but the drunken skipper
flourished his cutlass furiously over his head. "Board me! ye pirates!
the first that lays a finger on my bulwarks, off goes his hand at the
wrist." Suiting the action to the word, he hacked at the tow-rope so
vigorously that it gave way, and the boats fell astern.

Helen Rolleston uttered a shriek of dismay and pity. "Oh, save him!" she
cried.

"Make sail!" cried Cooper; and, in a few seconds, they got all her canvas
set upon the cutter.

It seemed a hopeless chase for these shells to sail after that dying
monster with her cloud of canvas all drawing, alow and aloft.

But it did not prove so. The gentle breeze was an advantage to light
craft, and the dying _Proserpine_ was full of water, and could only
crawl.

After a few moments of great anxiety the boats crept up, the cutter on
her port and the long-boat on her starboard quarter.

Wylie ran forward, and, hailing Hudson, implored him, in the friendliest
tones, to give himself a chance. Then tried him by his vanity, "Come, and
command the boats, old fellow. How can we navigate them on the Pacific
without _you?"_

Hudson was now leaning over the taffrail utterly drunk. He made no reply
to the mate, but merely waved his cutlass feebly in one hand, and his
bottle in the other, and gurgled out, "Duty to m' employers."

Then Cooper, without a word, double reefed the cutter's mainsail and told
Welch to keep as close to the ship's quarter as he dare. Wylie
instinctively did the same, and the three craft crawled on in solemn and
deadly silence, for nearly twenty minutes.

The wounded ship seemed to receive a death-blow. She stopped dead, and
shook.

The next moment she pitched gently forward, and her bows went under the
water, while her after-part rose into the air, and revealed to those in
the cutter two splintered holes in her run, just below the water-line.

The next moment her stern settled down; the sea yawned horribly, the
great waves of her own making rushed over her upper deck, and the lofty
masts and sails,