Nita tried to encourage the frightened creature, but all in vain, for the torrents of falling rain and the boom of the waves produced so much noise that they could not distinguish each other's voices.
"Oh, what shall we do? what shall we do?" shrieked the frightened maid, half-crazed with alarm. "I'll go to the captain this minute and beg him to take us back home."
Half-crazed by fear, she ran shrieking out upon the deck, and, at a sudden lurch of the yacht, fell prostrate. Nita followed, and stooped to help her to rise. What followed was told afterward with a white face of horror by the yacht captain who, just coming to seek them, became an eye-witness of a terrible tragedy, and himself narrowly escaped becoming a victim.
The night was inky-black, only for the fitful lightning flashes; the wind violent; the rain pouring in torrents, and he began to feel alarmed himself for the safety of the yacht and its passengers.
As Irwin and Van Hise were both suffering the agonies of sea-sickness, he thought of the two solitary women who might be frightened, and started to speak a word of comfort to them.
Staggering over the rocking deck toward the light that flickered from the cabin door, he beheld Lizette rush out shrieking with fear.
The yacht dipped down into the trough of a sea, and the maid lost her footing and fell prostrate. The next instant a blinding electric flash showed him Nita clinging to and trying to lift Lizette; then the bow of the yacht dipped lower still and the curving billow rose up high in air; then it broke over the deck in a fury and flung the man prostrate upon his face. He clutched at something—he never knew what—and the mighty mass of water swept over him.
The yacht bounded upward again, and—but for the man clinging and gasping for dear life—the deck was swept bare.
On the wings of the sobbing gale came to him shrieks of despair from the two doomed women swept off into the sea.
A few minutes longer the storm raged wildly, then as if the elements had wreaked their fury, the sea grew calmer, the winds lulled, the rain ceased, the black clouds parted above, and silvery moon-rays fringed the rents with heavenly glory.