“She’s a good deal smashed, Cap’n, but she can stand it a while longer.”
“Man the weather–whip! Haul out!” the keeper was shouting. Out to the wreck, the breeches buoy traveled, and then returned with its freight of a second man.
“Haul the hawser taut there!” cried the keeper to Walter and Woodbury, who stood near the sand anchor and handled the tackle for tightening the hawser. Each rescued man proved a rescuer, going to work at once. There were three more brought ashore by the buoy, and then the keeper ordered the life–car forward. The buoy was quickly removed, and in its place above the roaring surf hung the life–car, riding along the hawser on its way to the wreck. The life–car was shaped like a boat, made of galvanized sheet iron. It was about eleven feet long, three deep, and over four wide, and would carry a load of six or seven persons. It was roofed over, and its cargo was received through a hatch which was securely covered, but little openings in the top admitted the air. The car had now gone to the wreck, had received its load, and in response to the keeper’s “haul ashore!” was traveling landward along the hawser. It was a feeble, shivering lot of mortals who crawled through the hatch at the end of the trip.
“Come he did, nearer, nearer!” (p. [321]).
“Any more?” asked the keeper. “Two and the captain,” said an old man. Once more the life–car was hauled out to the wreck, while Walter was sent to the station with the chilled passengers and a sailor whom the storm had overcome. As Walter walked along the sands, he watched the terrible agitation of the water near him.
The sea would swell into long folds of angry green, and these would rush toward the shore, swelling, threatening, more and more angry, greener, perhaps tipped with a scanty wreath of foam, only to roll over menacingly, tumbling, crashing in furious uproar, breaking into a million bits of foam. As an opposing rock was struck by a wave, this would be thrown up into a huge mound of froth that broke all along its summit into a delicate, misty veil of lace. This wave was only the front rank of an army whose name was legion, rolling, rushing in wrath toward the land, breaking and foaming, clambering up the high shore–ledges to vainly tear at them, smothering and drowning what could not be rooted up and borne away. In what faultless curves they turned over, these gigantic billows when they struck the shore, rings of emerald, wheels of porphyry, arcs of spheres of crystal! Down, down, down, then plunged the water, and these cataracts met their doom in a hopeless swirl of surf. All along the beach was the frothing tumble of these cascades of the ocean. Beyond the shore–waves it was one confusing mass of ghostly water, of white hands lifted and white faces raised,—in pity and prayer? No, in an anger where all color disappears, where is only the aspect, of a wrath, ghastly and awful. Occasionally some log would come out of this wild whirlpool of the demons, some fragment of a ship torn by the storm as if an animal, limb from limb, and flung in scorn upon the shore. What a tale each fragment could have told! Perhaps it was a handful of moss plucked from a rock, or a starfish, or the tiniest mussels gathered up from the bottom of the sea and then shot landward.
How the sea roared! It seemed as if into that wild chorus all the notes of angry winds and mad torrents, and the crash of thunder, and the voices of men in their human wrath, and the shouts of demons in their satanic fury had been gathered, and now were let loose with all the confusion of the fiercest hurricane. Now and then, Walter thought he caught the dismal groan of a fog–horn attached to a buoy at the mouth of the river, and intended to warn mariners of the nearness of sand bar and rockledge. It was an illusion though, for who in the storm could hear any such agency piping out its feeble little note of warning?
In the meantime, the car had brought from the wreck its last load. The captain was a part of it, a stout, heavy, dark–bearded man.