"They're out of reach!" said Mason solemnly. And then the throng was silent.
"They are building a raft!" shouted a man with a glass, speaking at intervals for the information of all. "One man is tying a rope to planks ... he is helping the other men ... he has his little raft nearly ready ... they are crawling toward him—"
"O see them!" exclaimed Rose. "O the brave men! There! they are gone—the vessel has broken up."
On the wave nothing now lived but a yellow spread of lumber; the glass revealed no living thing.
Mason turned to Rose with a grave and tender look.
"You have seen human beings engulfed like flies—"
"No! no! There they are!" shouted a hundred voices, as if in answer to Mason's thought.
Thereafter the whole great city seemed to be watching those specks of human life, drifting toward almost certain death upon the breakwater of the south shore. For miles the beach was clustered black with people. They stood there, it seemed for hours, watching the slow approach of that tiny raft. Again and again the waves swept over it, and each time that indomitable man rose from the flood and was seen to pull his companions aboard.
Other vessels drifted upon the rocks. Other steamers rolled heavily around the long breakwater, but nothing now distracted the gaze of the multitude from this appalling and amazing struggle against death. Nothing? No, once and only once did the onlookers shift their intent gaze, and that was when a vessel passed the breakwater and went sailing toward the south through the fleet of anchored, straining, agonized ships. At first no one paid much attention to this late-comer till Mason lifted his voice.
"By Heaven, the man is sailing!"