“Are you able to hold this?”
Probably she replied, but her utterance was swept away by the wind ere the words had crossed her lips. She took the folded cloak in her hands, and the action sufficed.
Then Maseden left her. During this second crossing to the forecastle he knew beyond range of doubt that he had reached the limit of physical endurance. He had eaten nothing during many hours, he had been knocked insensible and had lost a good deal of blood. It was not in human nature that any man, howsoever fit and active he might be, could survive these heavy drains on his energies and yet put forth the sustained effort now called for.
It tasked his grit to the uttermost to go on this time. He knew in his heart that a third double passage was not to be thought of.
So, during the brief respite while a wholly insensible woman was being tied to him, he contrived to shout to the nearest man on the spar:
“I’m all in! You fellows must follow as best you can. It’s not so bad for a man crossing alone. Turn your back to the wind.”
He had adopted that method while carrying the girl already on the rock, and the force of the gale had seemed to exert less drag on his arms.
It needed a real life-and-death struggle to gain the ledge this time. During a minute or longer he could not even endeavor to undo the rope. He merely lurched forward on to the tiny platform and sank in a heap with the inert body of a girl bound to his back. Then he felt dizzily that someone was gaining a foothold on the rock behind. With a mighty effort he bundled his own body and the girl’s out of the way.
He fancied he heard a shout and a scream, but was beyond knowing or caring what had happened. Had he slipped down into the raging vortex beneath and been whirled to almost instant death he would have felt a sense of relief that the long drawn-out and unequal fight was ended.
He revived under the stress of a new horror. He found himself gazing blankly into a dim obscurity in which there was neither broken topmast nor unheaved forecastle. The tons of metal piled on a slippery rock had vanished completely, and the hapless few who had survived the slow agony of those hours of waiting in the chart-room were hurled to death at the very moment when fate tantalized them with the prospect of rescue!