“Joe! Allan! George! Out with the sweeps, lively! We’re going aground.”
Harvey sprang to the wheel, hauling in on the main-sheet as he did so.
But it was too late. There was a gentle shock that shook the sloop from end to end, a dull, grating sound, and the next moment the big sloop rested firmly on a jagged rock of the reach, listing as she hung, and wrenching the bilge so that she made water rapidly.
“Whew!” cried Harvey. “Here’s a mess. We’re wrecked, and badly, too. How in the world are we ever going to get out of this?”
It was, indeed, a serious problem. The Surprise, her bow planks ripped open by the collision, had sunk within a few minutes, and now lay on bottom, with her deck covered. The big sloop, hard aground and full of iron ballast, was not a thing to be moved easily.
“This is a scrape and no mistake,” said Harvey. “Here we are, where a boat may pick us up in a day or a week, but more likely not for a week. We’ve got our man, but the reefs have got us. Well, we have got to figure out some way to get out of it ourselves.”
But first they took account of their wounds, which had, now that the excitement was over, begun to sting and smart. They found that neither Harvey’s nor Tim’s wound was at all serious, mere surface flesh-wounds. The back of young Tim’s hand was bare of skin for the length of three inches across, and Harvey’s shoulder bled badly till it was cleansed and bandaged, but it was the price of victory, and they accounted it cheap. All of them had honourable scars of battle, bruises and scratches without number, and every one of them was proud of his, and wouldn’t have had one less for the world.
Taking their prisoner, securely bound, they all rowed ashore to survey their surroundings, build a fire and get breakfast, and make plans for getting away.
“There’s only one thing to be done,” said Harvey, after they had finished breakfast and sat by the shore, surveying the wrecks of the yachts. “The Surprise is done for. We can’t raise her. But the big sloop is not so badly hurt but what we can repair her, if we can only float her. The first thing we have got to do, when the tide goes out, is to get all that pig iron out of her, and that’s a day’s job, at the least. Then we may beach her at high tide and patch her up. It’s a big contract, though.”
That day they brought the spare sails of the sloop ashore and pitched a tent with them; and, when the tide was low enough for them to work, they began the hard labour of lightening the big sloop of its ballast.