His Unknown Wife

by Louis Tracy

Then he understood. The ship was in pieces on the reef. Two bits of her still remained; the forecastle, a stubborn wedge nearly always the last part of a steel-built vessel to collapse, and the bridge, with its backing of the chart house. All else had gone—the funnels had fallen an hour earlier.

Even the steel plates and stout wood work of the superstructure had melted away from the six strong ribs to which the sunken engines were bolted, leaving the bridge and chart house in air.

Already, too, one of the six pillars which had proved the salvation of that forlorn aerie had yielded to the strain and snapped. In the half-light it was difficult to discern just what support was given to the squat rectangle of the chart-house; Maseden had to look long and steadily through the flying scud before he gathered the exact facts.

The upper deck of the forecastle shut off any glimpse of the cliffs. All he could see was the reef, much more visible now, but still partially submerged by every sea; beyond it, a howling wilderness of broken water, and in the midst of this depressing picture, the ghost-like chart-house and bridge.

But he recalled vividly enough the sight of an awesome precipice close at hand before something had hit him and robbed him of senses. If the ship, or what was left of her, was lodged on the reef towards which she was being driven at the time of his mishap, the shore could not be far distant.

Within a foot of where he lay on the deck, clinging to it as a man might save himself from falling off the steeply-pitched roof of a house, was the big bole of the foremast, on which the rings of the sails formed a sort of ladder. He pulled himself up, stretched his body along the mast in the opposite direction, and made out the uneven summit of the cliff above the straight line of the upper deck.

He was exposed to the weather here, but the waves were not breaking across the forecastle now, and the spray and biting wind tended rather to dissipate the feeling of lassitude which had proved quite overpowering while he remained in the bunk. He raised himself cautiously another foot or so, and the rugged wall of the precipice loomed so close that at first he fancied the wreck was touching it.

The broken topmast, however, swaying in the wind, and still held to its more solid support by a couple of wire stays, pointed drunkenly at the cliff, and the pulley dangling from it was occasionally dashed by the gale against an overhanging ledge.

Even while Maseden was arriving at a pretty accurate estimate of the way in which he had been injured—because he now recalled the parting of the anchor cable—the forecastle moved again, the wet and frowning wall became even more visible, and although an awesome gap intervened, the swaying, pointed spar seemed to offer a fantastic glimpse of a means of escape.

As yet, the truck, or top of the mast, was fully sixteen feet distant from the face of the cliff. But it had been twenty feet or more distant a moment ago, and that last movement of the hull had lessened the width of the chasm.