After what had seemed an eternity of suspense the craft answered her helm and regulating planes and regained her balance. The scare the boys had received, though, prevented them from trying any more experiments. Thoroughly exhausted Frank at last relinquished the wheel to Harry, at the latter’s earnest solicitation. As the boys changed places the ship, none too steady under the conditions, gave a lurch to port that threw Frank from his feet and sent him crashing against the left-hand rail of the pilot-house. The force of the impact of his body snapped off the stanchions that supported the canvas screening round the pilot-box and he would have shot over the edge into countless feet of space if Harry had not grasped him and hauled him back to safety. Frank thanked him with a look. It was no time for words.
“Hark,” suddenly cried Frank, as there came a lull in the storm, “what is that?”
Below them both boys could hear a long, booming sound.
“It’s the surf breaking on the beach!” groaned Frank, “only Providence can save us now.”
How much longer they drove on above the sea, they had no means of reckoning, even if they had cared to. Their only hope was in daylight when there was a chance that some ship might see them and pick them up. Harry sat grimly at the wheel, keeping the creaking ship dead before the wind, which had now increased.
“It’s not much use,” he shouted to Frank, who lay on the pilot-house floor so as to keep the center of equilibrium as low as possible, “but we might as well stick to it as long as the engine does.”
Frank nodded and shouted back his favorite “While there’s life there’s hope.”
Suddenly, while an unusually prolonged and vivid flash enveloped the Golden Eagle and showed a wild sea leaping hungrily below her, Harry gave a loud shout:
“Frank, Frank,” he yelled, “look there!”
He pointed a little to the north of the direction the Golden Eagle was taking, or rather being driven, which, though the boys did not know it, was due east.