But it was then that the black horizon was suddenly cleft by another speck. A boat was driving shoreward in mad career though a mere shred of canvas was visible at the foot of the bare pole The sailors who had crept out to the most exposed rocks and were lying there on their stomachs to offer least exposure to the wind and waves, looked at one another despairingly. Too late, they all agreed. That straggler would be the blood offering to the sea! Impossible to enter now!
Sharp eyes soon made out the identity of the craft. Flor de Mayo! Flor de Mayo! The boat came on, now swallowed in the deep trough, now rearing on the crests of the combers. Siñá Tona and Dolores began to shriek and scream like mad. They seemed bent on rushing out into the water, and actually tried to reach one of the sea-swept boulders that stood out in the surf like heads of giants peering above the turmoil. And the sympathy and sorrow that misfortune brings to multitudes now turned to the two women. Curses at the Rector ceased. Sailors gathered round them with assurances that everything would be all right, though some of the men, foreseeing the inevitable end of the ghastly battle, tried to prevent them from looking on. And so an hour passed. A sight to turn your hair white!
Pascualo, out at sea, felt the need of encouragement in his anxiety. And he called to tio Batiste.
"You know the Gulf, tio," he shouted. "What do you think of the looks of things?"
But the old man, awakening with a start from his chill and torpor, shook his head sadly, and on the face above his white goatee the resignation of glorious, fearless manhood was written. No, in an hour it would be all over! No crossing the tide-rip in a sea like that. You could take his word for that! In all his life he had never seen such a wind! But the Rector felt the strength for anything within him. "Well, if we can't get in, we'll hold offshore, by God! and ride her out!" "No, you can't do that. There's going to be two days of it, at least. The boat might stand the seas, but you can't beat against this blow. If you try to coast along, you'll strike at Cullera, and if you get by there, you'll fetch up on the Cape. No, the one chance is running in. If it's dying, let's die near home, where so many of the boys have died, and in sight of the Christ of the Grao!" And tio Batiste, hitching around in the leashes that held him to the mast, got one hand into his shirt front, drew out a tarnished crucifix of bronze, and kissed it devoutly over and over again.
The old man's voice seemed to put spirit into the other men. "Cristo! a pretty time for parson stuff!" Tonet jeered with a sepulchral laugh, and the two sailors began to curse at the old man with blasphemous obscenities. Danger, instead of crushing them, seemed to translate despair into raving impiety. The skipper shrugged his shoulders indifferently. A good Christian he was! If you didn't believe it, ask don Santiago. But he knew one thing, that the only Christ who would bring the Mayflower through that fix was Pascualo el Retor, and he might even do the trick if the damned boat minded her helm!
The proximity of shoal water was now quite apparent on the vessel. The combers had stopped coming in huge but fairly regular mountains from astern. A cross sea was running now, throwing a violent nasty chop back against the wind, and the water, piled up along the shore, was tumbling seaward in a gigantic undertow that broke to the surface in boiling seething whirlpools. The Mayflower, every timber in her sound and solid, creaked and strained in the new turmoil of conflicting forces. She was virtually unmanageable between the impact of the gale from astern and the water catching at her keel from forward and abeam. But though great waves were breaking over her from all directions, her hatches were firmly battened down, and nobly she struggled free each time. The Rector understood, however, that, caught now in the tide-run off the Breakwater, there was no alternative but to try for the harbor.
The people on the rocks were now in plain sight. Spray could be seen dashing over them, and occasionally their anguished voices even reached as far as the Mayflower's deck. Recristo! To be drowned like rats in a trap, under the very eyes of your folks, and they unable to help you! Dog of a sea! Pig of a wind! And the Rector, to vent his impotent fury, spat at the waves, as the vessel reared and plunged this way and that, the scuppers under, clear to the hatch, first to starboard and then to port, the cross-yard shoving its point under at every roll.
"Look out! Look out!"
Now the death blows were beginning to come.