hysical agony and the mental effort to
retain control of his faculties. Then he made out the schooner, a vague,
blurred shape a little down-stream, and he swam furiously, his face
dipping under each time his left hand came out.

He drew level with the vessel, clutched at her cable, a foot short, and
was driven against her bows. The stream swept him onward, gasping, and
clawing savagely at the slippery side of the schooner, until his fingers
found a hold. It was merely the rounded top of a bolt that he touched,
but with a desperate effort he clutched the bent iron that led up from
it to one of the dead-eyes of the mainmast-shrouds. He could not,
however, draw himself up any further, and he hung on, wondering when his
strength would fail him. The Siwash, who had crawled up the cable,
leaned down from above and seized his shoulder. In another moment he
reached the rail, and went staggering across the deck, dripping and
half-dazed.

Action was imperatively necessary, and he braced himself for the effort.
The schooner was lying with her anchor up-stream, but he did not think
it would be possible to heave her over it and break it out unless he
waited until the others arrived, and it would then be a lengthy and,
what was more to the purpose, a noisy operation. The anchor must be
sacrificed, but there was the difficulty that in the dark he could
hardly expect to find a shackle on the cable. Running forward with the
Siwash, he pulled out a chain stopper, and then shipping the windlass
levers found with vast relief that it would work. It would make a
horribly distinct clanking, he knew, but that could not be helped, and
the next thing was to discover whether the end of the chain was made
fast below, for it is very seldom that a skipper finds it necessary to
pay out all his cable.

Dropping into the darkness of the locker beneath the forecastle, he was
more fortunate than he could reasonably have expected to be, for as he
crawled over the rusty links he felt a shackle. It appeared to be of the
usual harp-pattern with a cottered pin, and he called out sharply to the
Siwash, who presently flung him an iron bar and a big spike. He struck
one of the two or three sulphur matches he had carefully treasured, and
when the sputtering blue flame went out set to work to back the pin out
in the dark. He smashed his knuckles and badly bruised his hands, but he
succeeded, and knew that he had shortened the chain by two-thirds now.

He scram