Then in a few minutes we were in a smother of foam across a little sand
bar, and after that in quiet water, and the sorely-tried ship was safe.
She took the ground gently enough in the little creek, not ten score
paces from where the boat was lying, and we were but an arrow flight
from the shore. As the tide rose the ship drifted inward toward it, so
that we had to wait only for the ebb that we might go dry shod to the land.

Before that time came there was rest for us all, and we needed it
sorely. It was a wonder that none of the children had been hurt in the
wild tossing of the ship, but children come safely through things that
would be hard on a man. Bruised they were and very hungry, but somehow
my mother had managed to steady them on the cabin floor, and they were
none the worse, only Havelok slept even yet with a sleep that was too
heavy to be broken by the worst of the tossing as he lay in my mother's
lap. She could not tell if this heavy sleep was good or not.

Then we saw to the wounded men, and thereafter slept in the sun or in
the fore cabin as each chose, leaving Arngeir only on watch. It was
possible that the shore folk would be down to the strand soon, seeking
for what the waves might have sent them, and the tide must be watched also.

Just before its turn he woke us, for it was needful that we should get a
line ashore to prevent the ship from going out with the ebb, and with
one I swam ashore. There was not so much as a stump to which to make
fast, and so one of the men followed me, and we went to the boat, set
the altar stones carefully ashore, then fetched the spare anchor, and
moored her with that in a place where the water seemed deep to the bank.

It was a bad place. For when the tide fell, which it did very fast, we
found that we had put her on a ledge. Presently therefore, and while we
were trying to bail out the water that was in her, the ship took the
ground aft, and we could not move her before the worst happened. Swiftly
the tide left her, and her long keel bent and twisted, and her planks
gaped with the strain of her own weight, all the greater for the water
yet in her that flowed to the hanging bows. The good ship might sail no
more. Her back was broken.

That was the only time that I have ever seen my father weep. But as the
stout timbers cracked and groaned under the strain it seemed to him as
if the ship that he loved was calling piteously to him for help that he
could not give, and it