XIV
DÉBÂCLE
The Trouble, meantime, was closing in upon the scene of tragedy with little less than locomotive speed. Yet, however suddenly disaster had overtaken the other vessel, Whitaker saw what he saw and had time to take measures to avoid collision, if what he did was accomplished wholly without conscious thought or premeditation. He had applied the reversing gear to the motor before he knew it. Then, while the engine choked, coughing angrily, and reversed with a heavy and resentful pounding in the cylinder-heads, he began to strip off his coat. He was within ten yards of the wreck when a wave overtook the Trouble and sent a sheet of water sprawling over her stern to fill the cockpit ankle-deep. The next instant he swung the wheel over; the boat, moving forward despite the resistance of the propeller, drove heavily against the wreck, broadside to its stern. As this happened Whitaker leaped from one to the other, went to his knees in the cockpit of the wreck, and rose just in time to grasp the coaming and hold on against the onslaught of a hurtling comber.
It came down, an avalanche, crashing and bellowing, burying him deep in green. Thunderings benumbed him, and he began to strangle before it passed....
He found himself filling his lungs with free air and fighting his way toward the cabin doors through water waist-deep. Then he had won to them, had found and was tearing frantically at the solid brass bolt that held them shut. In another breath he had torn them open, wide, discovering the woman, her head and shoulders showing above the flood as she stood upon a transom, near the doorway, grasping a stanchion for support. Her eyes met his, black and blank with terror. He snatched through sheer instinct at a circular life-preserver that floated out toward him, and simultaneously managed to crook an arm round her neck.
Again the sea buried them beneath tons of raging dark water. Green lightnings flashed before his eyes, and in his ears there was a crashing like the crack of doom. His head was splitting, his heart on the point of breaking. The wave passed on, roaring. He could breathe. Now if ever....
As if stupefied beyond sensibility, the woman was passive to his handling. If she had struggled, if she had caught at and clung to him, or even if she had tried to help herself, he would in all likelihood have failed to cheat destruction. But she did none of these things, and he managed somehow to drag her from the cabin to the cockpit and to jam the life ring over her head and under one arm before the next wave bore down upon them.
As the wall of living green water drew near, he twisted one hand into the life-line of the cork ring and lifted the woman to the seat of the cockpit.
They were borne down, brutally buffeted, smothered and swept away. They came to the surface in the hollow of a deep, gray swale, fully fifty feet from the wreck. Whitaker retained his grasp of the life-preserver line. The woman floated easily in the support. He fancied a gleam of livelier consciousness in her staring eyes, and noticed with a curiously keen feeling of satisfaction that she was not only keeping her mouth closed, but had done so, apparently, while under water.
Relieved from danger of further submersion, at all events for the time being, he took occasion to rally his wits and look about him as well as he was able. It was easy, now, to understand how the kidnappers had come to their disaster; at this distance he could see plainly, despite the scudding haze, the profile of a high bluff of wave-channelled and bitten earth rising from a boulder-strewn beach, upon which the surf broke with a roar deafening and affrighting. Even a hardy swimmer might be pardoned for looking askance at such a landing. And Whitaker had a woman to think of and care for. Difficult to imagine how he was to drag her, and himself, through that vicious, pounding surf, without being beaten to jelly against the boulders....