“Does she fall off?” instantly called Wilder to the observant seaman at the wheel.
“She yielded a little, sir; but this new squall is bringing her up again.”
“Shall I cut?” shouted Earing from the main rigging whither he had leaped, like a tiger who had bounded on his prey.
“Cut!” was the answer.
A loud and imposing crash soon succeeded this order, though not before several heavy blows had been struck into the massive mast itself. As before, the seas received the tumbling maze of spars, rigging and sails; the vessel surging, at the same instant from its recumbent position, and rolling far and heavily to windward.
“She rights! she rights!” exclaimed twenty voices which had been hitherto mute, in a suspense that involved life and death.
“Keep her dead away!” added the still calm but deeply authoritative voice of the young Commander “Stand by to furl the fore-topsail—let it hang a moment to drag the ship clear of the wreck—cut cut—cheerily, men—hatchets and knives—cut with all, and cut off all!”
As the men now worked with the freshened vigour of revived hope, the ropes that still confined the fallen spars to the vessel were quickly severed; and the “Caroline,” by this time dead before the gale, appeared barely to touch the foam that covered the sea, like a bird that was swift upon the wing skimming the waters. The wind came over the waste in gusts that rumbled like distant thunder, and with a power that seemed to threaten to lift the ship and its contents from its proper element, to deliver it to one still more variable and treacherous. As a prudent and sagacious seaman had let fly the halyards of the solitary sail that remained, at the moment when the squall approached, the loosened but lowered topsail was now distended in a manner that threatened to drag after it the only mast which still stood. Wilder instantly saw the necessity of getting rid of this sail, and he also saw the utter impossibility of securing it. Calling Earing to his side, he pointed out the danger, and gave the necessary order.
“Yon spar cannot stand such shocks much longer,” he concluded; “and, should it go over the bows, some fatal blow might be given to the ship at the rate she is moving. A man or two must be sent aloft to cut the sail from the yards.”
“The stick is bending like a willow whip,” returned the mate, “and the lower mast itself is sprung. There would be great danger in trusting a life in that top, while such wild squalls as these are breathing around us.”