“It’s a child!” she murmured. “It’s a girl. Oh, Helen! there’s a girl–no older than we–on that wreck!”
The words of the men standing about them proved Ruth’s statement to be true. Others had descried the girl’s figure in that perilous situation. There was a woman, too, and seven men. Seven men were ample to man a schooner of her size, and probably the other two were the captain’s wife and daughter.
But if escape to the shore depended upon the work of the lifeboat and her crew, the castaways were in peril indeed, for the boat was coming shoreward now with a rush. With her came the tossing, charging timbers washed from the deck load. The sea between the reef and the beach was now a seething mass of broken and splintering planks and beams. No craft could live in such a seaway.
But Ruth and her friends were suddenly conscious of a peril nearer at hand. The broken lifeboat with its crew was being swept shoreward upon a great wave, and with the speed of an express train. The great, curling, foam-streaked breaker seemed to hurl the heavy boat through the air.
“They’ll be killed! Oh, they will!” shrieked Mary Cox.
The long craft, half-smothered in foam, and accompanied by the plunging timbers from the wreck, darted shoreward with increasing velocity. One moment it was high above their heads, with the curling wave ready to break, and the sea sucking away beneath its keel–bared for half its length.
Crash! Down the boat was dashed, with a blow that (so it seemed to the unaccustomed spectators) must tear it asunder.
The crew were dashed from their places by the shock. The waiting longshoremen ran to seize the broken boat and drag it above high-water mark. One of the crew was sucked back with the undertow and disappeared for a full minute. But he came in, high on the next wave, and they caught and saved him.
To the amazement of Ruth Fielding and her young companions, none of the seven men who had manned the boat seemed much the worse for their experience. They breathed heavily and their faces were grim. She could almost have sworn that the youngest of the crew–he had the figure “6” worked on the sleeve of his coat–had tears of disappointment in his eyes.
“It’s a desperate shame, lads!” croaked old Cap’n Abinadab. “We’re bested. And the old boat’s badly smashed. But there’s one thing sure–no other boat, nor no other crew, couldn’t do what we started to do. Ain’t no kick comin’ on that score.”