“I wonder if she’ll make it?” he murmured indifferently.
“It’s about a hundred to one that she won’t,” I answered.
He looked at Joe appraisingly.
“You’re all right,” said he, “to take a long chance like that for a rank stranger. I figured it was thumbs down for me. I knew I couldn’t swim ashore in that current, and I knew she’d founder as soon as she struck those rips.”
“She isn’t going to strike the rips,” my bolt cutter put in. “Look at the old packet.”
The Grosbeak lay over on her side and skidded—that is the only way I can describe her action—skidded right into the whirlpool, and spun there a dozen turns. Then, curiously, her broad fan-tail stern sucked down, down till the bluff bow pointed skyward, and so spinning, she disappeared.
“Either way,” said the man, with a shrug of his shoulders, “it made no difference.”
“Well, you didn’t,” Joe observed quietly.
“Thanks to you, I didn’t,” he said. “Still—I wasn’t particular.”
I looked at him attentively. He nursed his chin in one hand, staring at the place where the Grosbeak had been, a queer, pursed-up twist to his lips. For a man who had cheated death by scant ten feet of manila, he was singularly calm, even indifferent.