“Too late to do anything for her,” he shrieked back, shaking his dripping head, “but we ought to stand by for her boats, if they can live with them, poor wretches.”
The stress of conversation was too great to indulge in further. I grasped the rail before me and stood at Waller’s right hand, straining my eyes into the night. We needed all our strength, really, for the screw, but at Janson’s suggestion, the dynamo was set going, and our little searchlight streamed out in a thin shaft of light into the darkness. It tinged the frothy breakers with a dead white glow as of hoarfrost.
So we rode forward into the storm, the wind shrieking through our strained cordage, the spray fell like the lash of whips on our glistening decks, and the thud and swish of the surges against our bows answering the regular thump and rattle of the anchor-chains in the hawse-pipe, and the racket of the groaning machinery that echoed up from below.
Far ahead the little zone of golden light flashed before us, dancing and winking amid the tossing of the seas, darting here and there, pulsing quiveringly down the shaft of brightness that fed it from our top, flitting like some brilliant petrel of the night from crest to crest, spurning the foam, glittering through the veils of hissing spray that fell behind it like cascades of radiant jewels. And after it we waddled along steadily, fighting the rollers, flinching before the sting of the flipping drift, nosing into the depths of the green combs of angry water, rolling, pitching, jarring and quivering, but ever following like some trustworthy and attentive duck trailing after an evasive hummingbird.
The sheen of the furnace upon the sea was gleaming nearer. At times the glimmer of its flames was hid from us, as some mountain-like wall of water flung itself in between, but the glow of it was never lost to us. We could see the sparks stream up like puny rockets, as the gale planed them off the edge of the blaze, flinging them in clouds to leeward, as the ungoverned hulk swung heavily between the seas. The masts were pillars of living flame, that streamed into the night in bannerets of fire. Out of the main hatchway a solid white-hot glow of light was projected, shot with red streaks as burning splinters floated up in the strong sea-draught. From stem to stern the unfortunate bark was wrapped in a fiery sheet as the conflagration leaped and roared about it, devouring the seas that broke aboard into clouds of rosy steam.
“God help the poor wretches,” I shouted to Waller; “there’s no one left alive on that.”
“No, my lord, not this half-hour back. It’s their boats I’m watching for,” he answered, as, with the peak of his cap pressed over his eyes, he strained his gaze into the night. “It’s a ten to one chance against any boat living in this sea, but—well, there’s always a but, my lord.”
Janson was flirting the searchlight about and about the blazing hulk, like a very will-o’-the-wisp. It fled round it questioningly, picking at and dipping to every floating piece of wreckage, but never a one showed the sign of boat or human being. With our steam to help us, there was no danger in approaching the floating furnace as near as we thought well, and we slid up towards it as it lurched past us, till the heat of it blistered across the red seas on to our salt-cracked faces smartingly. The sparks skipped by us, and hissed like little adders on our streaming planks, but gaze as we would, nothing but charred timbers and leaping breakers met our eyes. We plunged forward into the darkness again, as she lumbered by before the wind.
“We ought to hang about in the direction she came from,” explained Waller thunderously. “The boats, if they lived, wouldn’t keep her pace. They aren’t so much exposed to the gale.”
I nodded, still gripping the rail before me, not wishing to waste breath that was twisted from one’s very lips by the wind, before it could frame a single intelligent word.