"Look at the fool!" he yelled. "He's trying to come about! If he gets into the trough——"
The thing was done almost as he spoke. A wilder squall than any of the preceding ones caught the upper works of the launch and heeled her spitefully. At the critical instant the steersman lost his head and spun the wheel, and it was all over. With a heaving plunge and a muffled explosion the launch was gone.
Once again Griswold was given to see the stuff Margery Grierson was made of in the finer warp and woof of her.
"That's for us," she said calmly; and then: "Help me get another inch or two on this sheet. We don't want to let those people on the Osprey do all of the heroic things."
Together they held the catboat down to its work, sending it ripping through the crested waves and fighting sturdily for every foot of the precious windward advantage. None the less, it was the big schooner, thrashing down the wind with every square yard of its reefed canvas drawing, which was first at the scene of disaster. Through the rain and spume they could see the schooner's crew picking up the shipwrecked passengers, who were clinging to life-belts, broken bulkheads, and anything that would float. So swiftly was the rescue effected that the rescuer had luffed and filled and was tearing on its way down the lake again when the close-hauled Clytie came up with the first of the floating wreckage. The tiller maiden's dark eyes were shining again, but this time their brightness was of tears.
"Oh, boy, boy!" she cried, with a little heart-broken catch in her voice; "some of them must have gone down with her! Can you believe that the Osprey got them all?" And then, with the sweet lips trembling: "I did my best, Kenneth; my very best: and—it wasn't—good enough!"
She was putting the catboat up into the wind, and Griswold stumbled forward to get the broader outlook. Suddenly he called back to her.
"Port!—port your helm hard! there's a man in a life-belt—he's just out of reach. Hold her there—steady—steady!" He had thrown himself flat, face down, on the half-deck forward and was clutching at something in the heaving seas. "I've got him!" he cried, and a moment later he was working his way aft, holding the man's face out of water.
It asked for their united strength to get the gray-haired, heavy-bodied victim of the capsize over the Clytie's rail. They had to bring the life-belt too; the old man's fingers were sunk into it with a dying grip that could not be broken. At first Griswold was too much preoccupied and shocked to recognize the drawn face with its hard-lined mouth and long upper lip. When he did recognize it the gripping fear was at his heart—the fear that makes a cruel coward of the hunted thing in all nature.
What might have happened if he had been alone; if Margery, taking her place at the tiller and busying herself swiftly in getting the catboat under way again, had not been looking on; he dared not think. And that other frightful thought he put away, fighting against it madly as a condemned man might push the cup of hemlock from his lips. Forcibly breaking the drowned one's hold upon the life-belt, he fell to work energetically, resorting to the first-aid expedients for the reviving of the drowned as he had learned them in his boyhood. Once, only, he flung a word over his shoulder at Margery as he fought for the old man's life. "Make for the nearest landing where we can get a doctor!" he commanded; and then, in a passion of gratitude: "O God, I thank thee that I am not a murderer!—he's coming back! he's breathing again!"