“I'm not sayin' what that shore is. I don' know, not me. We lost our bearings. It looks to me mighty cur'ous. But I'm sayin' there's no Yankee's goin' to capture my ship. Nameless she is, an' Nameless she goes. I'm goin' to beach her.”
Someone cried, “Beach her, cap'n. We're in it.”
After that, as it seemed to me, there was nothing but roar and tumult, with moments passing like seconds, till the cruise of the Nameless ended. I remember a shell from one of the cruisers that skipped along the water beside us—like those flat stones we used to throw slanting into the East River—and burst with a crack and spatter of spray just ahead. I remember how the surf towered and bubbled and roared at the ship's bows, and how I was cast headlong on the deck when she grounded.
They fired her too near the powder, and she blew up before the last had left, and one of the boats foundered in the surf.
I remember how bitterly the men worked, drawing the other boats over the sand hills, a quarter of a mile it might be, to the water within. The cruisers lay off shore, not daring to lower boats for the high seas and surf. But the strangest sight to me was the six drowned men, lying in the wash, and among them with his lips pursed out, as if amused and smiling up into the wild sky, that singular man, Dan Morgan. For he looked as if he liked it well enough, lying dead in the wash of the sea, and thought it odd at any rate that Bennie Cree should have been the death of him.
CHAPTER V.—TOMMY TODD'S.
The island seemed to stretch endlessly north and south, and to average half a mile in width; but there was a long slice of bay from the inner sound, nearly opposite to where the ship lay rolling in the surf and burning sullenly. Cavarly went over the sand hills and saw it, and made out a forested shore across the water, and saw the sail of a fishing boat in the distance.
They left Gerry and me to draw the bodies up the sand, and give them such poor graves as we could scoop with our hands.