Moreover, strange to say, his teeth were locked in the rope, for
he had laid hold with the last effort of despair.
The wind volleyed; the darkness remained impenetrable, and every sea
that came was a Niagara; yet the gallant smack stood to it, and Tom
Lennard slumbered after the breath came back to him. His ribs had stood
the strain of that rope, but he had really been semi-strangled, and he
was marked with two lurid, extravasated bands round his chest. He never
spoke before falling asleep; he only pressed Ferrier's hand and pointed,
with a smile, upward.
"If it goes on like this, sir, there won't be many of us left by the
morning."
"No, skipper. I hope the men will secure themselves like us. Mr. Lennard
had a near thing. He has a jaw like a walrus, or his teeth must have
gone."
So, in fitful whispers, the grim scraps of talk went on while the blare
of the trumpets of the Night was loosened over the sea.
"Look--over the port-side, there. It's beginning."
Ferrier could make out nothing until the skipper gave him the exact line
to look on. Then he saw a Something that seemed to wallow darkly on a
dark tumble of criss-cross seas.
"He's bottom up, sir. If we'd been running and gone into him, we should
have been at rest soon."
"How beautifully we are behaving, skipper. I suppose there's no chance
of our going like that?"
"Not without something hits our rudder. We seem to have got away from
the track now.
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