"Uncle Jim will have other tugs on the way as soon as he can wire for them," added Dan. "I think he ordered a schooner to run to Miami this morning with orders for more help to be sent you."
"They can't get out to us until this blow is over," said the captain. "We are in for a bad night, my boy. I wish you were out of it. But Captain Wetherly couldn't have taken you off to save his soul."
"I wouldn't have been here if you had been square—" Dan began to say with a sudden rush of anger. But it seemed as though Captain Bruce had not heard him, for he went on to say:
"If my boy had lived he would have been about your age now, Dan. He was just your kind of a youngster, too. Go below and get some supper, and some sleep if you can."
There was to be little sleep aboard the Kenilworth through this night. The gale had no more than begun to blow when the Resolute was forced to retreat. Long before midnight it was lashing the shoal water of the Reef into huge breakers which assailed the Kenilworth with thundering fury. Her keel began to pound as she was lifted and driven a little farther on the Reef by one shock after another. The decks sloped more and more until it was not easy to keep a foothold. The noise of the water breaking over her hull, the booming cry of the wind, the groaning and grating and shrieking of her steel plates as the Reef strove to pull them asunder, made it seem as if the steamer could not hold together until daylight.
The grimy men from the engine-room and stoke-hole had fled to the shelter of the steel deck-houses where they huddled with the seamen, shouting to each other in English, Norwegian, and Spanish. Captain Bruce and his officers finally gathered in the chart-room and discussed the chances of launching the boats if matters should grow much worse. Dan Frazier was doubled up in a corner chair, half-dead for sleep, but fighting hard to keep his wits about him and tell the others what he knew of the Reef and the water that stretched to leeward of the ship.
In answer to a question from Captain Bruce he said:
"This is the narrowest part of the Reef, Captain Wetherly told me, and if you can get your boats away in the lee of the ship and keep them afloat through the breaking water you will be in the Hawk Channel, only three miles from a string of keys. The channels between the islands are deep enough for a ship's boat. You don't need any chart to find smooth water in those lagoons, sir."
"Her bottom plates are opening up," growled the chief engineer who had just come up to report. "The sea is coming in fast. It has begun to flood the fire-room, and I can't make steam to keep the pumps going much longer."
"The bulkheads forward are twisting like so much paper," added the first officer. "They can't stand up if she racks herself any worse. Then she will be flooded fore and aft."