to labour heavily, and my father climbed to the deck to observe the
alteration in her trim. He dropped back and picked up his shovel
again in a chastened silence. In fact, deputy-captain Priske (who
had just accomplished the ticklish task of securing the rudder and
lashing a couple of ropes to its broken head for steering-gear) had
ordered him back to work, using language not unmixed with
objurgation.

For all our efforts the _Gauntlet_ still canted heavily to leeward,
and as the gale grew to its height the little canvas necessary to
heave-to came near to drowning us. Towards midnight our plight grew
so desperate that Billy, consulting no one, determined to risk all--
the unknown dangers of the coast, his complete ignorance of
navigation, the risk of presenting her crazy stern timbers to the
following seas--and run for it. At once we were called up from the
hold and set to relieve the half-dead workers at the pumps.

All that night we ran blindly, and all next day. The gale had
southerned, and we no longer feared a lee-shore: but for forty-eight
hours we lived with the present knowledge that the next stern wave
might engulf us as its predecessor had just missed to do. The waves,
too, in this inland sea, were not the great rollers--the great kindly
giants--of our Atlantic gales, but shorter and more vicious in
impact: and, under Heaven, our only hope against them hung by the two
ropes of Billy's jury steering-gear.

They served us nobly. Towards sunset of the second day, although to
eye and ear the gale had not sensibly abated, and the sea ran by us
as tall as ever, we knew that the worst was over. We could not have
explained our assurance. It was a feeling--no more--but one which
any man will recognize who has outlived a like time of peril on the
sea. We did not hope again, for we were past the effort to hope.
Numb, drenched, our very skins bleached like a washerwoman's hands,
our eyes caked with brine, our limbs so broken with weariness of the
eternal pumping that when our shift was done, where we fell there we
lay, and had to be kicked aside--we had scarcely the spirit to choose
between life and death. Yet all the while we had been fighting for
life like madmen.

Towards the close of the day, too, Roger Wearne had made shift to
crawl on deck and bear a hand. Captain Pomery lay in the huddle of
the forecastle, no man tending him: and old Worthyvale awaited
burial, stretched in the hold upon the ballast