He pointed to one of the lifeboats. The deck-hands, grasping the significance of this display of dumb-show, threw themselves upon the boat. Axes gleamed and fell with a succession of mingled thuds and crashes. Planks, timbers, knees, breast-hooks, thwarts, masts, and oars—all went below to the still insatiable maw of the devouring element.
The skipper of the Quilboma made no attempt to signal for a pilot. For one reason, he knew the dangerous entrance intimately; for another, it was doubtful whether the pilot could come out and board the vessel. Yet another: the ship could not afford to wait, with her steam pressure falling and the storm perilously close.
"Starboard—meet her—at that—steady!"
The skipper, standing beside the two quartermasters at the helm, was about to take his sorely tried craft over the dangerous bar. It required pluck, but there was no option if she were to make port at all. It had to be now or never, for, if the Quilboma failed to make the bar, she would either be dashed to pieces on the reef or drift helplessly at the mercy of the gale.
With the wind now broad on the starboard beam the old tramp rolled horribly. Peter, hanging on to the bridge-rail, fancied that every piece of steelwork in the hold had broken adrift. Groaning, thudding, quivering, swept by sheets of blinding spray, the Quilboma staggered towards the danger-zone. At one moment her propeller was almost clear of the water; at the next the labouring engines seemed to be pulled up, as the madly racing blades sank deep beneath the surface of the broiling sea.
Now she was in the thick of it. Tossed about like a cork, wallowing like a barrel, the old tramp was almost unmanageable. One of the quartermasters was juggling with the wheel of the steam steering-gear like a man possessed, as he strove to keep the old hooker on her course. To port and starboard the ugly reef was showing its teeth, as the remorseless breakers crashed and receded with a continual roar of thunder.
Suddenly a thud, different from the rest of the hideous noises, shook the ship from stem to stern. For a moment—to Peter the pause seemed interminable—she seemed to hang up. Then, with a sickening, sideways lurch she dragged over the hard sand into the comparatively deep and sheltered waters beyond.
"Done it, by Jove!" exclaimed the Old Man, as he rang down for half-speed ahead. "We're in."
But he was trembling like a person in a fit.
Twenty minutes later the S.S. Quilboma berthed alongside the quay. The order to draw fires was a superfluous one. The furnaces had burned themselves out.