"Hang on to her," he said. "Oh, hang on. Down on her bilge, and let her go when the sea sucks out again."
They went out with her and it amidst a sliding mass of sand, and somehow contrived to hold her when the next sea came in. It broke across her, and some of them went down, but when the seething flood swept on up the beach she was there still, and they went out again waist-deep in the downward swirl of it. Then they were up to the shoulders with a great hissing wall of water close in front of them, and black man and white scrambled in over the gunwale and floundered furiously in the water inside her, groping for oar and paddle. Still, they were perched on the gunwale, and the man with the blue-striped forehead had the big steering oar before the sea fell upon them, and straining every muscle they drove her through the breaking crest of it.
She lurched out, half-full and loaded heavily, to face the next, and Desmond was never certain how she got over it, but at least, he was not washed out of her as he had half expected. He fancied there was a faint shouting on the bluff, but nobody could have been sure of that through the din of the surf, and all his attention was occupied by his paddle. Very slowly, fighting for every fathom, they drove her outshore, until the combers grew less steep and their crests ceased to break, and Desmond gazing seawards could see the Palestrina when she lifted. She swung with the swell, a dim, blurred shape, without a light on board her, but a sharp jarring rattle told him that his instructions were being carried out. Winthrop the mate was already heaving his anchor. That was satisfactory, for Desmond knew that nobody could see the yacht through the spray that floated over bluff and beach.
They were alongside in some twenty minutes with another troublesome task before them. The yacht was rolling heavily, and the big half-swamped boat swung up to her rail one moment and sank down beneath a fathom of streaming side the next. It was a difficult matter to reach her deck, and Lamartine's boys were bushmen who knew nothing of the sea. They crouched in the boat's bottom stupidly until their white companions who found thumps and pushes of no avail seized them by their woolly hair and dragged them to their feet. They were sent up one by one, and when at last the boat was hove in by the banging winch Desmond scrambled with the brine running from him to his bridge. The windlass rattled furiously for another minute or two, and then with a quickening throb of engines the Palestrina swept out into the night. A little while later Winthrop the mate climbed to the bridge, and Desmond laughed when he asked him a few questions.
"I don't think those folks ashore got a sight of the yacht or boat," he said. "It will be morning before they find out where we've gone, and we should be a good many miles to the north by then. I don't suppose they know Ormsgill isn't with us either, and that will probably put them off his trail for a time, at least. In the meanwhile you'll head her out a point or two more to the westwards for another hour, and have me called at daylight. I'm going down to change my clothes."
He had just dressed himself in dry garments when a steward tapped at the door of his room.
"I don't know what's to be done with those niggers, sir," he said. "The men won't have them in the forecastle."
"Ah," said Desmond a trifle sharply, "that's a thing I hadn't thought of, though, of course, it might have struck me. They're on deck still? Bring me a lantern."
The man got one, and Desmond who went out with him held it up when they stood beside the little group of dusky men who sat huddled together upon the sloppy deck. A seaman stood not far away from them, and he turned to Desmond.
"We can't have them down forward with us, sir," he said.