Then, dead ahead, clanged her bell. The next instant, plunging along at least eight miles an hour, in spite of engines clawing at full speed astern, the towering bow smashed into the obstacle in her path.
It was a mighty shock which sent a tremor from stem to stern of the great fabric. They saw that they hit her—a three-masted schooner at anchor, with her sails set, dingy canvas wet and idle in the foggy, breathless night. But their impact against her was almost as if they had hit a pier. The collision sent them reeling about the pilot-house. As they drove past they saw her go down, her stern a splintered mass of wreckage, in which men were frantically struggling.
“That's a granite-lugger! See her go down, like a stone!” gasped Mate Bangs. “My God! What do you suppose she has done to us forward?”
“Get there. Get there!” roared Captain Mayo. “Get there and report, sir!”
But before the chief mate was half-way down the ladder on his way the wailing voice of the lookout reported disaster. “Hole under the water-line forward,” he cried.
“There are men in the water back there, sir,” said a quartermaster.
“We're making water fast in the forward compartment,” came a voice through the speaking-tube.
Already they in the pilot-house could hear the ululation of women in the depths of the ship, and then the husky clamor of the many voices of men drowned the shriller cries.
Captain Mayo had seen the survivors from the schooner struggling in the water. But he rang for full speed ahead and ordered the quartermaster to aim her into the north, knowing that land lay in that direction.
“Eight hundred lives on my shoulders and a hole in her,” he told himself, while all his world of hope and ambition seemed rocking to ruin. “I can't wait to pick up those poor devils.”