Poodle held his breath and waited.
For five minutes, they followed the coast-line, at sixty miles an hour—an easy speed for the Hustle, with her powerful engine; then Hike struck the clutch in the second notch.
At the second speed, they whirled at a hundred miles an hour. They rocked and bumped on the air-currents coming up between cliffs. Poodle held his cap before his face, trying to catch his breath, and clung to a strut with his other hand. He was too frightened to look down at the cliffs, that rushed like a black streak beneath them, but he kept arguing with himself, “Now, Poodle, me boy, now Poodle, cheer up. You’re a nice kid, Poodle, and you’ll sure get a golden harp, even if you do get killt!”
In fifteen minutes, they were over the barren coast near Sur, and Hike made out the wrecked yacht—a long, low line of white-painted hull, with masts and stack tilting far over on the ledge where she stuck, smashed by heavy surf that was breaking over her. A man was tied to the mast-head, waving a signal flag wildly at the Hustle. A little group of people clung to the upper rail of the yacht, watching, waiting, chilled and wet.
Hike slowed down and let the Hustle hover over the wreck, looking curiously down at the white faces that peered up at him, from amid spray. A huge comber swept over them—and one man was carried away. Shrieks and wails came up to him through the thunder of the surf, as he shut off the motor for a second.
With a quick glance, he studied out the landing places nearby. Between the wreck and the shore there was only a wave-swept ledge of rock. The shore itself was mostly composed of sheer black cliffs that ran straight down into the water. Up these terrible walls the waves ran; up ten—fifteen—twenty feet, and crashed down again, leaving the rocks shining with water. But at one spot, the shore ran in, leaving a triangle of nearly dry beach, from which a man could climb up the cliffs to safety.
That was enough for Hike. “Let that rope hang in big loop—so—” he yelled to Poodle. “Fasten two ends to strut. Tight. Reg’lar anchor-knot. Let loop hang below machine.”
As Poodle obeyed, Hike hovered directly over the wreck, in the smallest circles he could manage, and at the slowest rate he could make the Hustle go.
The faster an aeroplane skates over her thin crust of air—like a boy on thin ice—the safer she is. But with the Hustle’s many planes, she could hover, like a gull over a crumb in the water.
Yelling down to the people twenty feet below, waving, he made them understand that they were to wrap themselves, one by one, in the loop of the dangling rope. Finally, as the rope swept over the deck, a tall man in a reefer caught it, sat in the loop as if it were a trapeze, and was carried out over the waves, his dangling feet kicking violently.