As the boat in which he and Bill were sitting beside Mr. Smallwood was lowered, Jack glanced upward and had a view of the lighted decks, the rails being lined with the heads of curious and excited passengers. Then came a sickening swing outward as the ship rolled.
“Let go all or we’ll be smashed!” shouted Mr. Smallwood.
For a moment, as the ship heaved back, it seemed indeed, as if the boat was doomed to be dashed against her steel sides and smashed into splinters. But in the nick of time the “falls” were let go “all standing.” The boat rushed downward and struck the top of a great wave with a force that shook her. The next instant, the patent blocks opened and on the crest of the great comber Mr. Smallwood’s boat, and the others, were swept off into the darkness.
Behind them arose a mighty cheer, but they hardly noticed it in the excitement and danger of the launching.
“A bad night for this work,” muttered Mr. Smallwood as the boat was lifted heavenward and then rushed down into a dark profundity from which it seemed impossible she could emerge. A blood red glow from the leaping flames enveloping the stern of the doomed craft, which was a large, single funneled steamer, lay on the roughened sea.
“Are there passengers on board, do you think?” asked Jack, rather tremulously, as the blood-chilling uproar from the burning vessel continued.
“Looks to me more like a freighter—hard there on the bow-oars,—meet that sea,—she has no upper decks,” replied the third officer.
“I don’t see anybody on board her, either,” said Bill, after an interval, during which the boat escaped swamping, as it seemed to the boys, by a miracle only.
“Let’s hope they got away,” said the third officer, “but that devil’s concert on board beats me. It’s not human, that’s one sure thing. What in blazes is it?”
“It gives me the shivers,” confessed Bill.