Chapter Twenty One.
Rescued.
We five—Jan Steenbock, Tom Bullover, Hiram, Sam Jedfoot, and lastly, though by no means least, myself—sole, solitary survivors of the awful catastrophe that had swallowed up our comrades, stood on the cliff above the yawning chasm, watching the tidal wave that still ebbed and flowed in diminishing volume at each reflux.
This it continued to do for a full half-hour afterwards, when the sea returned to its normal state, welling up tranquilly on the beach, and quickly washing away all traces of the recent convulsion of nature, as if nothing had happened—a sort of sobbing moan, only, seemed afterwards to come from the water every now and then at spasmodic intervals, as if the spirits of the deep were lamenting over the mischief and destruction they had wrought!
Scarcely could we believe our eyes; for, while not a single plank or piece of timber was cast ashore of the ship, which must have been taken down bodily by the remorseless wave that had hurried our cruel captain and no less cruel mate, and the rest of the crew, nineteen souls in all, into eternity, without the slightest forewarning of their doom, the little bay now looked as quiet and peaceful as of yore, with its outstretching capes on either hand, and everything still the same—equally wild, desolate, deserted, as when we first beheld it!
Most wonderful of all, though, was the fact that we alone were saved.
We were saved!
That thought appeared to flash through all our minds at once simultaneously; and, falling on our knees, there, on the summit of the headland, whence we had witnessed the terrible tragedy and now gazed down on the once more placid, treacherous sea, we each and all thanked God for our deliverance from the peril of the waters, as He had already delivered us from the cruelty of man—in the person of that treacherous, drunken demon who had abandoned us there to the solitude and the misery of exile and sailed off to enjoy, as he thought, the ill-gotten treasure of which he had robbed us. But he had met even a worse fate than he had meted out to us; for, what could have been worse for him than to die and be called to account for his misdeeds at the very moment of the realisation of his devilish design?