“This is the last end of it, that’s wot I think,” declared Swivel cheerfully. “It’ll blow itself out now purty soon.”
Brandon could not look at the situation thus hopefully, but he determined to say nothing further to make the girl despair.
Swivel’s tone shamed him into thinking of her rather than of himself.
The men on board the steamer, had ere this discovered what had happened, but they could do nothing to assist the three on the brig.
It was absolutely necessary to keep some headway—considerable, in fact—on the whaleback, to prevent her from swinging around into the trough of the waves. Every moment they were getting farther and farther away from the doomed derelict.
Caleb roared something to them through the trumpet, but the distance and the howling of the gale prevented them from making out what he said. The wind and spray beat upon them alternately as they crouched together in the high bows, and every other sound but that of the elements was drowned.
“Come back in the shelter of the mast,” Brandon shouted at last. “We can do nothing further here. Our position is so exposed that we may be washed off before we know it.”
Each of the boys grasped an arm of the captain’s daughter and with no little trouble they managed to reach the great tangle of rigging and shreds of canvas which hung about the one remaining mast.
The topmast had long since been carried away, but the main spar still defied the storm, writhing and twisting like a thing of life in the fierce grasp of the gale.
Here, crouching under its lee, the shipwrecked boys and girl clung to the stiffened ropes with hands little less stiffened by the cold and water.