"It's pouring into her!" he cried.
"Then, you'll have to pump!"
"We passed an opening some miles to lee. Wouldn't it be better if you ran back there?" Carroll suggested.
"No! I won't run a yard! There's another inlet not far ahead and we'll stand on until we reach it. I'd put her on the beach here, only that she'd go to pieces with the first shift of the wind to westward."
Carroll agreed with this opinion; but there is a great difference between running to leeward with the sea behind the vessel and thrashing to windward when it is ahead, and he hesitated.
"Get the pump started! We're going on!" Vane said impatiently.
Fortunately the pump was a powerful one, of the semi-rotary type, and they had nearly two miles of smoother water before they stretched out of the bay upon the other tack. When they did so, Carroll, glancing down again through the scuttle, could not flatter himself that he had reduced the water. It was comforting, however, to see that it had not increased, though he did not expect that state of affairs to last. When they drove out into broken water, he found it difficult to work the crank. The plunges threw him against the coaming, and the sea poured in over it continually. There are not many men who feel equal to determined toil before their morning meal, and the physical slackness is generally more pronounced if they have been up most of the preceding night; but Carroll recognized that he had no choice. There was too much sea for the boat, even if they could have launched her, and he could make out no spot on the beach where it seemed possible to effect a landing if they ran the sloop ashore. As a result of this, it behooved him to pump.
After half an hour of it, he was breathless and exhausted, and Vane took his place. The sea was higher; the sloop wetter than she had been; and there was no doubt that the water was rising fast inside of her. Carroll wondered how far ahead the inlet lay; and the next two hours were anxious ones to both of them. Turn about, they pumped with savage determination and went back, gasping, to the helm to thrash the boat on. They drove her remorselessly; and she swept through the combers, tilted and streaming, while the spray scourged the helmsman's face as he gazed to weather. The men's arms and shoulders ached from working in a cramped position; but there was no help for it. They toiled on furiously, until at last the crest of a crag for which they were heading sloped away in front of them.
A few minutes later they drove past the end of it into a broad lane of water. The wind was suddenly cut off; the combers fell away; and the sloop crept slowly up the inlet, which wound, green and placid, among the hills, with long ranks of firs dropping steeply to the edge of the water. Vane loosed the pump handle, and striding to the scuttle looked down at the flood which splashed languidly to and fro below.
"It strikes me as fortunate that we're in," he commented. "Another half-hour would have seen the end of her. Let her come up a little! There's a smooth beach to yonder cove."