There was a dull throbbing in Nat's head and he felt numb and stiff. But another roller breaking over him at that instant, as the schooner took a plunge, convinced him that he must muster all his strength to get out of his perilous position or be miserably drowned.
A pallid, gray dawn lay over the waters and Nat, after he had, by a supreme effort, worked his way up the bobstay to a higher position, saw to his dismay that the schooner must be some distance out at sea. She seemed to be rushing through the water at a speed which he estimated at about ten knots an hour. Allowing then that the time was about four-thirty, she must have made some forty miles or more since midnight.
Nat placed his hand to his head, which ached cruelly. He found that it was cut quite badly, but luckily the wound was only a flesh one and his involuntary salt water bath had washed it clean.
"When the schooner struck the boat," he mused. "I remember jumping upward and nothing after that. The dolphin striker must have hit me but it seems I had wits enough left to cling on to the bobstay. A good thing I had, too, or I'd be in Davy Jones' locker by this time. I wonder what became of the rest of them. Thank goodness, Joe, Ding-dong, and Cal can all swim, and if they were not knocked insensible they are all right."
Nat looked about him once more. Above him the jibs of the schooner were bellying whitely out under the fresh breeze. Beneath him the water boiled under the smart craft's sharp prow. All about—the rising sun gilding it—was the heaving waste of the broad Pacific.
Truly Nat was in a quandary. Remain where he was he could not. Even had it not been for the impossibility of doing without food or water he could momentarily feel himself growing weaker. Before the cut in his head had stopped bleeding, he reasoned that he must have lost considerable vital fluid.
"What am I to do?" thought Nat to himself. "I recognized Morello's voice when he shouted that warning just before the boat was struck. My life aboard this schooner will be worth just about what it would be in a den of savage tigers. Even if it were not for the grudge Morello owes me for betraying his fortress in the Sierras, he has sufficient reason to wish me out of the way. What am I to do?" he concluded, with the same question with which he had begun his gloomy ruminations.
The question was unexpectedly answered for him. Swensen, in his capacity as sailing master of the schooner, came forward at that moment to look at the headsails. After peering aloft in sailor fashion he squinted over the bow to see how the "Nettie Nelsen" was cleaving the waters. Hardly had he poked his blond head over the bow before he became aware of Nat clinging to his precarious perch, and busy with his gloomy thoughts.
"Hul-lo!" he roared. "Dere bane boy on der bobstay, by Yiminy!"
His shout brought Morello and Dayton and half a dozen others—among them the ill-favored Manuello—to the bow. They echoed the Swede's shout, as in the wet-through, miserable figure clinging to the bobstay and looking up at them they recognized the boy who had done more than any one else to bring their rascally careers to a termination.