quick
oaths, a cry. The _Arrow_ scarcely hesitated. She had cut away nearly
the entire stern works of the _Blackbird_. But such was her momentum
that the shock barely slowed her up. Her hull bumped the _Blackbird_
aside. She passed on. She did not even stand by to see what she had
done. There was a sound of shouting on her decks, but she kept on.

MacRae could have stepped aboard her as she brushed by. Her rail was
within reach of his hand. But that did not occur to him. Steve Ferrara
was asleep in the cabin, in the path of that destroying stem. For a
stunned moment MacRae stood as the _Arrow_ drew clear. The _Blackbird_
began to settle under his feet.

MacRae dived down the after companion. He went into water to his waist.
His hands, groping blindly, laid hold of clothing, a limp body. He
struggled back, up, gained the deck, dragging Steve after him. The
_Blackbird_ was deep by the holed stern now, awash to her after fish
hatch. She rose slowly, like a log, on each swell. Only the buoyancy of
her tanks and timbers kept her from the last plunge. There was a light
skiff bottom up across her hatches by the steering wheel. MacRae moved
warily toward that, holding to the bulwark with one hand, dragging Steve
with the other lest a sea sweep them both away.

He noticed, with his brain functioning unruffled, that the _Arrow_
drove headlong into Cradle Bay. He could hear her exhaust roaring. He
could still hear shouting. And he could see also that the wind and the
tide and the roll of the swells carried the water-logged hulk of the
_Blackbird_ in the opposite direction. She was past the Rock, but she
was edging shoreward, in under the granite walls that ran between Point
Old and the Cove. He steadied himself, keeping his hold on Steve, and
reached for the skiff. As his fingers touched it a comber flung itself
up out of the black and shot two feet of foam and green water across the
swamped hull. It picked up the light cedar skiff like a chip and cast it
beyond his reach and beyond his sight. And as he clung to the cabin
pipe-rail, drenched with the cold sea, he heard that big roller burst
against the shore very near at hand. He saw the white spray lift ghostly
in the black.

MacRae held his hand over Steve's heart, over his mouth to feel if he
breathed. Then he got Steve's body between his legs to hold him from
slipping away, and bracing himself against the sodden lurch of the
wreck, began to take off his clothes.

C