"Yes, but only for a second."
"You thought it best not to join them?"
"You know that I would gladly go now and attempt it. But I dared not refuse the better way. I can't tell you what happened. Something stilled the sea like magic. Look at it now."
Assuredly the waves were breaking again around the pillar with all their wonted ferocity, but one among the Trinity House officers noticed a smooth, oily patch floating past the vessel.
"By Jove!" he shouted, "Brand helped you at the right moment. He threw some gallons of colza overboard."
Traill, a bronzed, spare, elderly man, tall and straight, with eyes set deep beneath heavy eyebrows, went to Jim Spence and Ben Pollard where they were helping to sling the Daisy up to the davits.
"I said five hundred between you," he briefly announced. "If the rope holds, and the three people I am interested in reach the shore alive, I will make it five hundred apiece."
Ben Pollard's mahogany face became several inches wider, and remained so permanently his friends thought, but Jim Spence only grinned.
"You don't know the cap'n, sir. He'll save every mother's son—an' daughter, too—now he has a line aboard."
Then the ex-sailor, chosen with Ben from among dozens of volunteers owing to his close acquaintance with the reef, bethought him.