! There! they are
gone--the vessel has broken up."

On the wave nothing now lived but a yellow spread of lumber; the glass
revealed no living thing.

Mason turned to Rose with a grave and tender look.

"You have seen human beings engulfed like flies--"

"No! no! There they are!" shouted a hundred voices, as if in answer to
Mason's thought.

Thereafter the whole great city seemed to be watching those specks of
human life, drifting toward almost certain death upon the breakwater
of the south shore. For miles the beach was clustered black with
people. They stood there, it seemed for hours, watching the slow
approach of that tiny raft. Again and again the waves swept over it,
and each time that indomitable man rose from the flood and was seen to
pull his companions aboard.

Other vessels drifted upon the rocks. Other steamers rolled heavily
around the long breakwater, but nothing now distracted the gaze of the
multitude from this appalling and amazing struggle against death.
Nothing? No; once and only once did the onlookers shift their intent
gaze, and that was when a vessel passed the breakwater and went
sailing toward the south through the fleet of anchored, straining,
agonized ships. At first no one paid much attention to this late-comer
till Mason lifted his voice.

"By Heaven, the man is _sailing_!"

It was true; steady, swift, undeviating, the vessel headed through the
fleet. She did not drift nor wander nor hesitate. She sailed as if the
helmsman, with set teeth, were saying:--

"By God! If I must die on the rocks, I'll go to my death the captain
of my vessel!"

And so with wheel in his hand and epic oaths in his mouth, he sailed
directly into the long row of spiles, over which the waves ran like
hell-hounds; where half a score of wrecks lay already churning into
fragments in the awful tumult.

The sailing vessel seemed not to waver, nor seek nor dodge--seemed
rather to choose the most deadly battle-place of waves and wall.

"God! but that's magnificent of him!" Mason said to himself.

Rose held her breath, her face white and set with horror.

"Oh, must he die?"

"There is no hope for him. She will strike in a moment--she
strikes!--she is gone!"

The vessel entered the gray confusion of the breakers and struck the
piles like a battering-ram; the waves buried her from sight; then the
recoil flung her back; for the first time she swung broadside to the
storm. The work of the helmsman was over. She