Within the Capes

by Howard Pyle

But Jack was blind and deaf with his passion, and would listen to nothing. Tom struggled with him as long as he was able; holding on to the tiller with might and main, fighting him off, and pleading with him all the while.

I suppose that they must have fought for two or three minutes, and the boat was nearly swamped more than once with their struggles. At last Jack wrenched Tom’s hands away and seized hold of the tiller, for a great part of Tom’s strength had gone from him, because of long and hard exposure, which seemed to have told more upon him than on Jack.

The men appeared to be pretty well frightened by this time, and Hitch had taken his oar again. In a moment Jack had put the boat’s head toward the shore.

“Pull lively now, my hearties,” said he, grimly, “for you’ll have a tough pull of it before you get to that beach over yonder.”

Just before they came to the outer line of breakers, Jack put the cutter’s head about so as to let her beach stern foremost.

Tom knew that the cutter would never get through the breakers. There was not the tenth part of the tenth part of a chance of it; therefore he flung off his coat and kicked off his shoes, so as to be in readiness when the time should come. There was not much of the raging and the lashing of the surf to be seen from the sea. Now and then a spit of foamy water would shoot high up into the air from the recoil of the waters on the hard sand, but they could not tell what the full wrath and roaring of the great breakers were until they had gotten fairly in amongst them.

Jack did all that a man could do to get that boat to the beach. He tried rather to keep it off than to urge it too rapidly toward the shore. He did his work well, for he had brought the cutter through the first line of breakers, and into the second—but he got her no further.

A monstrous wave, fully twelve feet high, a solid mountain of green water, came rushing toward them, its crest growing sharper and sharper, and seeming to mount higher and higher as it swept toward the shore.

“Pull for your lives!” roared Jack, in a voice of thunder. But it was no use, for the next instant the breaker was on them. For a moment Tom had a feeling of spinning toward the shore, with the green water towering ten feet above him; then it arched slowly over, there was a crash and a roar, and he was struggling in a whirling, watery blindness.

Over and over he rolled, grasping at the sand every now and then, but all the time feeling himself as helpless as a rat in the tumultuous swirling of the water. Presently he felt himself being sucked out again. Faster and faster he went, as the undertow gathered force in its rush. For a moment he gained his feet, and bore with all his strength against the outgoing water. The sand slid from beneath his heels, till he must have sunk three inches into it. For an instant he had a half-blinded vision of Jack Baldwin, fifteen or twenty feet nearer to the shore than himself. Then came another crashing roar, and he was whirled over and over and round and round, like a feather in the water. A great feeling of utter helplessness came over him; for a moment his lips came to the surface and he gave a gurgling cry.