“Come!” he said, in answer; and, without another word between us, we had slipped down and taken the water.
As for that, it was chill enough, but, to traverse the interval, child’s play for swimmers so young and hardy. In five minutes we had emerged, sleek and dripping, on the further side, and the wreck was close before us.
We shook ourselves like dogs, and ran up the sand. The shivered frame of the thing lay pitched on the sharp back of the drift, where the poor ship must have dumped herself to be broken like a stick across a housemaid’s knee. What remained was a melancholy witness to the impotence of man’s bravest efforts to command Nature in her passions. She must have been a fine craft, of many thousand tons burden, by evidence of this fragment. Ex pede Herculem. Now, the forlorn remnant of her was so shattered as to look, at these close quarters, more like the wreck of a blown-down hoarding than of a gallant vessel. Wryed, and gaping, and burst apart, her ribs had been stripped, inside and out, of everything that could be torn away and swallowed; so that what survived, survived by virtue of a tenacity, which, inasmuch as it had defied the wrench of the storm, was little likely to yield us salvage.
And, indeed, we reached her only to find our apprehensions confirmed. Shorn through her waist, it appeared, close off by the poop, and her fore-part lifted, and rolled, and ravished God knew whither, she had disgorged her vitals into the gulf to the last bolt, so that not one loose board of her remained to reward us, unless buried beyond our recovery in the sand, into which the jagged wound of her emptied trunk was plugged.
We climbed, and pulled, and tested, running hither and thither. We fell upon our knees, and with our hands dug frantically, until they bled, into the wedged drift. It yielded nothing. From time to time we desisted, and gazed, in a panic of fear, at the water, where, but a few yards beyond and below her stern, it rustled and curvetted, advancing and retreating, and advancing yet another step to play cat-like with our anguish.
At last, and for the last time of many, we mounted the slope of stubborn planks, to struggle with some fractured balk of timber, some broken rib end, which might seem to promise yielding to our frenzied blows and kicks. It was all of no avail. Like lost souls we paused, looking down on a litter of splinters, our great need’s only recompense; and, “O, my God!” whispered Harry, and staggered back where he stood, and flung himself, quite ill and overcome, upon the bulwarks.
He was up by the broken stern-post, and, sick to note the rising of the tide, he looked down. On the instant he uttered a wild exclamation, jumped to his feet, went over the side, and vanished.
I was poising myself a little below on the slope of the deck. At his cry I dropped and slipped, landed at the bottom, recovered my feet, and raced round to meet him. Then I, too, uttered a yell; for here, unnoticed by us before, was at least a straw of hope to catch at.
It was a great spar, which lay down the slope of the sand, with some wreck of tackle yet tangled about it, and its butt wedged under the stern of the ship.
“Lord!” shrieked my friend. “Come and pull, Dicky! O, Lord! Come and pull!”