“For God’s sake, look at that!”
I picked the boat up at a glance, and knew that in the moment of my inattention the tide had vomited her out of Hell Gate and past the black teeth of Skeleton Point. But she was in hard case, helpless in that terrible sweep, lurching heavily down to her sheer strake. Thus she would lie canted on her side half a minute on end. Then she would straighten loggily. Again she would spin in the grip of a whirl, a masterless craft, at the whimsical mercy of the sea. I knew that by the way she yawed and spun, and the silence of her—no chatter of engine, nor dull popping of exhaust. Her power plant was dead. She was about a forty-footer, of the work-boat type. As for her crew—one man stood by the stumpy signal mast, and that was all I saw. He waved a hand to us airily, as if it were all in the day’s work, that sickening lurch, that uncontrollable spinning in the swirls.
We were all outside on the bank by then, my third man, Joe, and myself. I squinted seaward and saw very near at hand the tide rips tumbling in a rising gulf swell.
“There’s only one chance for him on God’s green earth,” said I. “If he goes into those rips without steerageway—good night. If the back eddy catches him, we might heave him a line as she swings past. Come on!”
Past the mouth of the lagoon, a low cliff gave straight down on the eddy’s sweep, and I had often noticed that driftwood making its interminable round passed under the cliff. At the end of my cabin hung a coil of half-inch rope. This I took hurriedly, and a link from a boom chain weighing perhaps half a pound for a weight whereby to cast the line. Skirting the lagoon, we three came to the cliff and stood by to watch, I knotting fast the weight. And by the turn of chance or the hand of Destiny, the back eddy caught him in the nick of time.
As he swung out of the seaward stream into the eddy and turning from those ominous rips began his swift circle inshore and toward us, I knew that his chance was small if we failed to reach him on the first or second turn.
I knew his trouble by the boat’s loggy swing. Without power to give her steerageway, she had swept through Hell Gate, taking water by the barrel, escaping destruction against cliff and reef only by some miracle of the sea. But she rode deep, and listed heavily now to starboard, now to port, as if all weary of the struggle. Her buoyancy was gone. If she circled in the eddy till she drew to its center that spinning whirl would suck her down.
“Give me the line!” Joe said, as she shot down toward us.
It was the first word he had spoken, and with it there shone in his eyes such a gleam of resolve as I had never surprised there—as if before a fellow being’s peril his own embittered soul had cast off its lassitude, had fired with the human instinct to do, to help, to save.
He swung the link on the rope’s end as a sling-shot thrower whirls his missile, and as the boat—now showing the name Grosbeak in bold white against her black bow—came abreast, he shot the line with a tremendous heave of his body. I could not have cast it as far by forty feet, I know. But the throw failed. It was scarce in a man’s arm to bridge the distance. The speed of the current helped to fool him besides. The line fell short, and to the rear.