The fellow had nigh reached the bridge—was getting purchase to make the leap, in fact—when the scene culminated. A "ninth" wave hit the tottering mast, and it snapped like a rotten branch, dashing the seven men hard upon the surface of the sea, and throwing the eighth from his hold so that he went down as from a trapeze. Then his head struck a spike of rock with such a horrid sound that those who heard it covered their faces and turned from the sight. Of the seven who went under with the mast but two rose again, showing terror-struck visages in the dawn light, and crying piteously, as though the sea would relent or the rocks rise to give them foothold.
Meanwhile Burke upon the bridge paced like a caged beast, for there was water everywhere below him, and he could not grasp any stay by which he might reach the safer haven of the poop. But when he saw the three aft, he seemed to gather coherence, and he bawled to them—
"You there! Have you got ever a line?"
"Not a yard but the lashing!" roared Messenger in reply.
"Do you make out anything ashore?" he asked next.
"Nothing but a headland, and hills beyond it," cried Messenger; but he went on with a question—
"Is it ebb or flow?"
"It's ebb, if I'm not dreaming," roared Burke. "We struck at the top of the tide. Is your end holding, or is she full?"
"She's holding; but there's more shift in her than I like," responded Messenger.
"Same ez with me," yelled Burke. "I'm going shoreward. I'll die quick, by gosh! if there ain't no other road."
The man was calm enough, and they watched him grasp a belt from the bridge and worm his shoulders into it. He stood thus irresolute above the chasm of waters for a long-drawn minute, and spoke again before the sea cast him to the venture, not biding his irresolution—
"Where's Kenner?" said he.
"Dying!" gasped Kenner, who had got consciousness, and sat up against the hatchway; but his croaking voice was lost in the scream of wind.
"Is he gone?" shouted the skipper, pausing at the lee side of the bridge.
"No, but he's mighty sick," cried Messenger, helping his voice with his hands.
"Wal," responded Burke, "he's had a run for his money, anyway. We'll share the yaller load in hell, all of us, I guess!"
He was about to say more, but the bridge beneath him of a sudden fell before the ceaseless onslaught of the swell, and, rearing up its edge high above the water, disappeared in a moment, carried by the rushing current which swept between the crags. Those on the poop saw Burke battling with the surf for a spell, then he disappeared between the islets of rock, and before they could think more of him their attention was turned to their own position and the hazardous shifting of the stern of the yacht.
Fisher was the first to notice it.
"Prince," said he, "we've got to move our quarters—the poop's going over."
"I was noticing it," replied Messenger.
"Do you think you could swim to shore if you got free of the rocks?" asked Fisher, adding: "One of us will have to stand by Kenner."
Messenger turned to look at the American, who was sitting half dazed and voiceless, and he said—
"Kenner, we're going to swim for it."
At these words the American raised his head and struggled to his feet.
"You won't leave me," he gasped; "I can't die alone!" And then he fell to wailing like a woman, and staggered toward the door of the staircase, whence he slid down the inclined plane of the deck until he was caught by the stream amidships and carried into the whirlpool. Fisher had followed him instinctively, and was in the water to grip him even before he sank for the first time; and from that moment began the lad's terrible battle with the cataracts of the reef. "Twice," said the lad, in his account of it, "I felt the seas closing over my head. Then a great hill of wave rose over me, and sent me deep down with a terrible singing in my ears. Each time that I rose, holding to Kenner—who, to my surprise, did not hamper me in the water—I saw the rocky pinnacles towering (they looked a great way) above me; and I was drawn so near to them in the vortex that I thought every minute I should be ended with a clout on the head which would stun me. How it really was I cannot say, but suddenly, as Kenner began to give in, and I was wasting all my strength in holding his head above water, we were carried immediately into a channel where there was scarcely any sea; and from that moment I could swim in comfort. Even then there seemed no hope of reaching the dark line of the shore; and the great headland, which loomed like some black phantom on my right hand, appeared only as a shadow on my hopes. You may judge of my surprise at last when, having swum no more than a couple of hundred yards, I found myself able to touch ground with my feet, and discovered that there was not a man's height of water below me. Thence onward was lurching, staggering work, but half-an-hour of it brought us right up out of the sea, and we sank breathless upon a heap of sand at the foot of a tremendous cliff, and there lay like dead men."
Meanwhile Messenger had not hesitated to face the terror of the rock-pool, and, having given one piteous glance at the wreck wherein all his hope lay, had dived boldly from the poop, and had come more readily than the others into the comparative calm of the open water, and so to the shallows. He was, as were the two who had first reached land, exhausted and nigh dead; he trembled with the cold; his face was an ashen colour; his clothes hung in rags upon him. But his first act, on coming to the inhospitable haven, was to turn a long look to the distant islets, where the relic of the ship lay, and to stand motionless for many minutes before he sank upon the sand and buried his face in his hands.
For he knew in that moment that the great stake he had played for was lost, and that the gold was gone.
XI. ON THE FIELD Of THE AFTER-MATH
Day broke with southern maturity, a day of relentless sun and intermittent breeze; and the warmth was as wine to the men marooned by the act of God in the haven of Galicia. Even Kenner, who had been very near to death, felt the blood coursing through his veins again; and Fisher slept upon a sheet of sand, regardless of the powerful rays which, even in the hours of the early morning, poured down upon him. Messenger alone, shivering and silent, was cowed into the depths of melancholy by the overwhelming visitation which had fallen upon the yacht.
Nor, indeed, is it to be marvelled at that this man, to whose far-reaching mind the whole emprise had been due, should have lain under such subjection. Even three days before the coming of that unlooked-for disaster a future, at least of action and of possibility, opened before him. The possession of the gold in the cabin of the yacht had steeled him to face all the hazards of exile, of capture, and of pursuit. He contemplated, with no dismay, the vigilance of governments and the zeal of private persons. Once in South America with some hundreds of thousands of pounds at his call, and his own wits to befriend him, he would have scoffed alike at the diplomacy of ministers and the treachery of republics. But on that morning after the wreck he stood on the shores of Spain, a hunted man and a man without resource, friendless in an unbefriending land, the wreck of an ambition and the tool of a crime; and as the gloom of his hope deepened his face had more than its usual pallor, his mind was limp, his marvellous foresight seemed entirely to have left him.
Kenner, like enough, would have known the depressing spell of thoughts such as these if the buffeting he had got in the sea had not knocked thought out of him and left to him only thankfulness that he was rid of the peril. Fisher, on the other hand, who had passed through the week as a man in a dream, had neither hurt from the sea nor a haunting of the mind to combat, and he slept, being content that he had come to shore and that the terrible days of the voyage were gone forever.
The place where they had come to was rugged enough,