Brown thumped him on the back and roared:
"Of course you are, and you deserve your luck. But if you love me, come out of this. I'm a wet rag and you're worse."
For reply Brainard fought his way out along the railing of the pier, and gloried in the night. It matched his own mood. Like the sea, he had broken the bonds that for so long had held him tamed and stagnant. He was drunk with the wine of life, and the storm could not drag his whirling thoughts back to the red-roofed station beyond the Point.
Then the helpless Brown yelled in his ear:
"Turn around, Ash. Over here to the north'ard. Great Scott, what can we do?"
Brainard jumped to the note of alarm in the appeal. The moonlight still spattered across the white-fanged water. Driving along southward, close in shore, they saw a schooner, now a somber blotch, now outlined against the smother that flung itself at her. She seemed to be coming head on for the pier. The picture seared itself into Brainard's very soul. It hurled him back from his glad world regained to the station where he ought to be. But he waited to see if she could clear the pier. In an agony of impatience he crawled out where the sea was breaking clean over the structure, far beyond where Brown dared to follow.
He watched the doomed vessel wallow as she fled before the "norther," watched her lunge past the end of the pier, hardly more than a hundred yards away. By the rifting moonlight he could see that her decks were a tangle of wreckage, her headsails gone or flying in ribbons. She was pelting straight down the coast, helpless to claw off shore, helpless to heave to.
This was what Brainard realized as he groaned:
"She's heading straight for the Point, and she can't be handled to clear it. Or they may be hoping to fetch the Inlet and get inside, and they don't know it's choked up."
As he ran toward the beach, Brainard wondered how he could have forgotten. Why had not the first note of the storm called him home?