I gazed at him with intense anxiety.
“Three inches less. We’re gaining on the leaks!” he exclaimed.
I sprang to my feet and seized the brake. Jim struck out with his arms “to take the turns out of the muscles,” as he said, while he sat for a minute on the deck, and again went at it.
All this time the wind was falling and the sea going down. As we laboured at the pumps we looked out anxiously for the appearance of a vessel which might afford us assistance, but not a sail appeared above the horizon. We must depend on our own exertions for preserving our lives. Though a calm would enable us the better to free the brig of water and to get up jury-masts, it would lessen our chance of obtaining help. Yet while the brig was rolling and tumbling about we could do nothing but pump, and pump we did till our strength failed us, and we both sank down on the deck.
My eyes closed, and I felt that I was dropping off to sleep. How long I thus lay I could not tell, when I heard Jim sing out—
“Hurrah! We’ve gained six inches on the leak,” and clank, clank, clank, went his pump.
I cannot say that I sprang up, but I got, somehow or other, on my feet, and, seizing the brake, laboured away more like a person in his sleep than one awake.
I saw the water flowing freely, so I knew that I was not pumping uselessly. Presently I heard Jim cry out—
“Hillo! Look there!”
Turning my eyes aft, I saw the captain holding on by the companion-hatch, and gazing in utter astonishment along the deck. His head bound up in a white cloth, a blanket over his shoulders, his face pale as death, he looked more like a ghost than a living man.