Six men and the cook stormed up the beach with the life-gun and tackle, and as they toiled through the heavy sand in the teeth of the wind, Brainard was near collapse. But he rallied when they crept out toward the Point, and a red Coston light sputtered and flared ahead. Then Jim Conklin ran back to them waving his torch and crying:
"She's in the breakers on the weather side of the Point. The Boy guessed right. Breaking up fast, she is. Hustle up the gun."
When they sighted the stranded schooner even Brainard, who had foreseen her plight, was amazed at the quick fury of her destruction. The black lump of her hulk lay in a surf which broke sheer over it, and the stump of her mainmast rolled in appealing gestures to the sky. The first shot was fired dead against the wind, and the line fell short. A second and a third failed, and they did not even know whether life was aboard the wreck. At last a quartering shot sent the line across the schooner, and there came feeble twitches, electric pulsations that sent their message to the men ashore as if hands had been clasped across the boiling inferno of white water.
The wreck was breaking up fast. Her timbers strewed the beach, and drifted menacingly in the surf. But with slow, halting effort, the whip-line followed the slender cord of the projectile, and after that the heavy hawser trailed out into the night until the jerky signal came ashore that all was made fast. The surfmen tailed on and the breeches-buoy was dragged shoreward. At length a sodden shape, coughing and groaning, was pulled up on the sand by the men who rushed among the combers. Four more trips the breeches-buoy made, and three more sailors were fetched ashore alive. The last of these was asked how many were left aboard and he gasped:
"Nobody but the skipper, an' he's hangin' on by his toenails."
On shore they waited in vain for a signal, and none came. It was more ominous when the hawser slackened. It was read as a death-warrant when the hawser yielded to the tautening heave of the surfmen, yielded with sickening ease and came washing and writhing in to them, hand over hand, broken adrift from the wreck. The little group on the thundering beach stared across the ghastly water at the dissolving lump of the schooner, knowing by instinct that it would be foolishly futile to shoot another line seaward. They waited, and it was all that they could do.
To young Brainard this suspense was more killing than all the stress through which he had furiously toiled. No light, no sign of life, nothing to tell whether or not death had won in the home stretch!
A rescued seaman, battered and spent, cried out from where he lay on the sand: