"Keep her going as she's heading now," he said. "You'll see I've headed her up a few points to allow for the leeward drag of the tow. You can call me in a couple of hours, or earlier if there's any change in the weather."
He clawed his way down from the bridge to the little room beneath it, and shed only his streaming oilskins before he flung himself into his bunk. He was asleep in two or three minutes, and slept soundly while the water oozed from his wet garments, until he was roused by a shouting. Then his door was flung open, and a man thrust his head in.
"Mr. Lindstrom figures you'd better get up," he said. "The tow has parted her hawser, and gone adrift."
Jimmy was out of his bunk in a moment, and in a few more had scrambled to his bridge. Lindstrom, the Scandinavian, shouted something he did not hear, but that did not very much matter, for the one question was, where was the schooner, and Jimmy was tolerably certain that nobody knew. His light had been burning, and for the first few moments he could see nothing but blackness, out of which there drove continuous showers of stinging spray. Then he made out the filmy cloud it sprang from at the Shasta's bows, and swept his gaze aloft toward the pale silver streak above her mastheads, which showed where the half-moon might come through. As he did so, the Scandinavian gripped his shoulder, and he saw a red twinkle widen into a wind-blown flame low down upon the sea. Now he could, at least, locate the tow.
"Did you get a sight of the beach? How far were we off?" he shouted.
"A low point," said Lindstrom, "which I do not know. One mile, I guess it, and we head her out more off shore."
Jimmy was a trifle startled. Though the water is deep along that coast, a mile leaves very small margin for contingencies, and he fancied that the tow, blowing to leeward, would cover it in half an hour. In that case there was not the slightest doubt as to what would then happen to her. She might, perhaps, last five minutes as a vessel, for the reefs are hard and there is a tremendous striking force in the long Pacific seas. Another point was equally clear. He had some twenty minutes in which to overhaul the schooner and take her skipper off, and no boat to do the latter with. If he failed to accomplish it in the time, it was very probable that the Shasta would go ashore, and he did not think that any one would escape by swimming. Still, he meant to do what he could, and once more he set the whistle shrieking as he shouted to the helmsman.
The Shasta came round, and drove away into the darkness, for the light had died out again and there was nothing visible ahead but the dim white tops of frothing seas. Five minutes passed, and Jimmy felt the tension, for they were steaming toward destruction, and it was quite possible that they might run past the schooner or straight over her. Then a shaft of moonlight struck the climbing pines high up in front of him, and it seemed to him that he was already almost under them. He set his lips, and clenched the hand he would not raise in warning to the helmsman while the pale watery moonlight crept lower and lower. It rested for a moment on a fringe of creaming foam where the rock met the water, and then a hoarse shout went up, for as it swept toward him they saw the schooner.
She was not far ahead of them, with jib thrashed to ribands and the sea streaming from her swung-up side. Jimmy thrust down his telegraph and shouted to Lindstrom, who dropped from the bridge as they drove past her stern. Then, as he raised his hand, the man behind him gasped as he struggled with his wheel, and the Shasta, stopping, lay rolling wildly beneath the schooner's lee, while a shadowy figure gesticulated to those on board her from her spray-swept rail. Jimmy glanced shoreward over his shoulder toward the tumbling surf, and decided that he had at most five minutes to take that man off. After that it would probably be too late for all of them.
Mercifully the moonlight still streamed down, and he waited with lips set and hands clenched on the telegraph while the schooner, being lighter, drove down upon the Shasta. One blow might make an end of both of them, but something must be hazarded, and he spared a glance for the wet men who crouched upon the Shasta's rail with lines in their hands. He had smashed one boat not long ago, and the second and smaller one had been damaged a week earlier, bringing a Siwash to take them up a certain inlet off an unsheltered beach.