The crew were gathered aft and in the alleyways, for all forward of the bridge the decks were swept. Harman and the Captain were on the bridge.
Mac had the word to give her every ounce of steam he could get out of the boilers, in the desperate idea that the harder she was pressed the higher she might be driven on the rocks, and the tighter she might stick.
The roaring of the breakers seemed now all around them, and the Captain and Harman were clinging to the bridge rails, bracing themselves for the coming shock, when—just as a curtain is drawn aside in a theatre—the rushing clouds drew away from the moon.
The white, placid full moon whose light showed the foam-dashed coast to either side of them, and right ahead clear water.
They had struck the Magellan Straits by some miracle, just as the bullet strikes the bull’s-eye of a target, and right to port they saw a great white ghost rising in the moonlight and falling again to the sea.
It was the foam breaking on the Westminster Hall.
It was breaking three hundred feet high, and Harman, as he was hurled along to the safety of the Straits, caught a glimpse of the great rock itself after a wave had fallen from it, glistening in the moonlight desolately, as slated roofs glisten after rain.
That was a sight which no man, having once seen, could ever forget.
I met Blood last year. He was exceedingly prosperous, or seemed so. He told me this story, and I have so mixed names and places that he himself would scarcely recognise the chief actor, much less his enemies. As to the fate of the Penguin, I could only get him to say that she “went down” somewhere south of Rio, but that all hands were saved. Harman, he said, had turned religious.