Glancing at the sea, Jimmy shook his head. The combers were getting bigger with the rising tide and the sloop plunged into them viciously, flooding her forward deck, and jarring her cable.
“No,” he said. “I had trouble in reaching the ladder, and she might drag to leeward before you could get back. The thing’s too risky.”
Moran, coming aft, felt the bag, and looked at the diving dress with longing, but he supported Jimmy’s decision.
“I surely don’t want to light out, but we’ll have to get sail on her.”
Crouching in the spray that swept the bows, they laboriously hauled in the chain with numbed and battered hands, and, leaving Bethune to hoist the reefed mainsail, coiled the hard, soaked kedge warp in the cockpit. Then they set the small storm-jib, and the Cetacea drove away before the sea for the sheltered bight.
“We’d have known how we stood in another hour,” Bethune grumbled, shifting his grasp on the wheel to ease his sore wrist.
They were too tensely strung up to talk much after supper, for the weight of the bag was sufficient to indicate the value of its contents, and they thought it better not to break the seals. Jimmy grew drowsy, and he had lain down on a locker when Moran opened the scuttle-hatch.
“Now that it’s too late to dive, the wind’s dropping and coming off the land,” he said.
Jimmy went to sleep, and it was daybreak when he was wakened by an unusual sound. It reminded him of breaking glass, though now and then for a few moments it was more like the tearing of paper. He jumped up and listened with growing curiosity. The noise was loudest at the bows, but it seemed to rise from all along the boat’s waterline. Moran was sleeping soundly, but when Jimmy shook him he suddenly became wide awake.
“What is it?” Jimmy asked quickly.