From the edge of the towans, where the ground dipped steeply to the long beach, they saw the wreck, about a mile up the coast and, as well as they could judge, a hundred or a hundred-and-fifty yards out. She lay almost on her beam-ends, with the waves sweeping high across her starboard quarter, and never less than six ranks of ugly breakers between her and dry land. A score of watchers—in the distance they looked like emmets—were gathered by the edge of the surf. But the coast-guard had not arrived yet.
"The tide is ebbing, and the rocket will reach. Can you see anyone aboard?"
Taffy spied through his hands, but could see no one. His father set off running and he followed, half-blinded by the rain, at every fourth step foundering knee-deep in loose sand or tripping in a rabbit hole. They had covered three-fourths of the distance when Mr. Raymond pulled up and waved his hat as the coast-guard carriage swept into view over a ridge to the right and came plunging across the main valley of the towans. It passed them close—the horses fetlock-deep in sand, with heads down and heaving, smoking shoulders; the coast-guardsmen with keen strong faces like heroes'—and the boy longed to copy his father and send a cheer after them as they went galloping by. But something rose in his throat.
He ran after the carriage, and reached the shore just as the first rocket shot singing out toward the wreck. By this time at least a hundred miners had gathered, and between their legs he caught a glimpse of two figures stretched at length on the wet sand. He had never looked on a dead body before. The faces of these were hidden by the crowd; and he hung about the fringe of it, dreading and yet courting a sight of them.
The first rocket was swept down the wind to leeward of the wreck. The chief officer judged his second beautifully and the line fell clean across the vessel and all but amidships. A figure started up from the lee of the deckhouse and springing into the main shrouds grasped it and made it fast. The beach being too low for them to work the cradle clear above the breakers, the coast-guardsmen carried the shore end of the line up the shelving cliff and fixed it. Within ten minutes the cradle was run out, and within twenty, the first man came swinging shoreward.
Four men were brought ashore alive, the captain last. The other two of the crew of six lay on the sands, with Mr. Raymond kneeling beside them. He had covered their faces, and, still on his knees, gave the order to lift them into the carriage. Taffy noticed that he was obeyed without demur or question. And there flashed on his memory a gray morning, not unlike this one, when he had missed his father at breakfast: "He had been called away suddenly," Humility had explained, "and there would be no lessons that day," and had kept the boy indoors all the morning and busy with a netting-stitch he had been bothering her to teach him.
"Father," he asked as they followed the cart, "does this often happen?"
"Your mother hasn't thought it well for you to see these sights."
"Then it has happened often?"
"I have buried seventeen," said Mr. Raymond.