A Rescue on the Diamond Shoals.
The Coast Guard Cutter in utmost peril, saving the lives of the crew of the wrecked steamer, Union.
"By the deep four!" called out the leadsman, as the water shallowed.
Eric felt an uncomfortable sensation at the pit of his stomach. Four fathoms! This was within a few feet of the bottom of the vessel. If she should strike!
But the first lieutenant, unperturbed, peered out into the grayness. The boy felt an overwhelming admiration of a man who could dare to take a ship over the worst piece of coast in all the broad Atlantic, in a driving hurricane, with never a landmark or a light to guide him, and hold his nerve cool and self-assured. The captain was on the bridge, but Eric noted that he never spoke to the first lieutenant. This, the boy thought, told even more the spirit of the Coast Guard. Each man had faith in the knowledge and skill of the other.
Into the very jaws of the breakers the little cutter sped, and, even while the boy was looking fearfully on every side of him to see the curling waves breaking on shoals not a hundred feet away, there appeared before them the wrecked and disabled steamer. Over the bars the vessel had pounded, her foretopmast had gone by the board, and she seemed in hopeless case.
So powerful was the gale that it had plucked the hapless steamer out of the jaws of the sucking sand, and flung her, like a plaything, into the breakers beyond. The Miami slowed down, her first pause in that awful race, which was ending in the maze of the Diamond Shoals, with waves breaking on every side and a hurricane whistling overhead.
It seemed even the most reckless foolhardiness to go on a fathom further, but the first lieutenant seemed to know the bottom as though it were a peaceful lane in a New England countryside, and after the Union, the Coast Guard cutter crept warily. Even the boatswain muttered under his breath,
"We'll never get out o' this!"
But, foot by foot, almost, the boy thought, step by step, the Miami overhauled the wrecked vessel.