writhing and quivering, was the deck-hand, a
study in steel and wire.

The afternoon was still young, but the heavens were darker than
twilight, and the rocking sea was as black as slate, save where a
comber, as though gnashing its teeth in fury, flashed a sudden white
crest, which crumbled immediately into the heaving pall.

"Now, boys, together! Catch back that last spoke we lost!"

And while Dan's words were being shattered into shreds of sound by the
shriek of the gale, the three men bent their backs in a fresh effort to
put the _Fledgling's_ nose a point better into the on-rushing waves.

They did it too. With a hiss and a crunch the bow swung in square to
the watery thunderbolts and the stanch craft, survivor of a hundred
perils, a ten-foot section of her port rail gone, a great dent in the
steel deck-house forward, began to climb over the water hills with much
of her usual precision--down on her side, clear to the bottom of a
hollow, then settling on an even keel with a jerk, climbing the slaty
incline, stiff as a church, then down, down, half on her side again,
then up once more.

"She's making good weather of it," and Dan took his hands from the
wheel, stood erect, and gazed through the after windows, searching a
horizon which he could see only when the tug climbed to a wave top. He
turned to his mate.

"There's no use hunting for those barges," he said tentatively. "When
that tow-line broke back there, it seemed as though one of my heart
strings went too. But there was nothing to do about it; nothing we
could do. It was all we could do to work the _Fledgling_ through."

"Most captains would 'a' cut them barges adrift long before the line
broke," replied the mate; "no use thinkin' about them now; they've
gone, long ago."

Dan worked his way along the pitching floor to the side windows. His
face was tense and drawn. He had never lost a tow before--this was a
part of his reputation. And now. . . . He turned slowly to resume his
place at the wheel, when suddenly, as the tug was sidling down a wave,
the tail of his eye caught a glimpse of a buff funnel protruding above
the wave tops a good quarter of a mile away. His first impression was
that the water had claimed all but the funnel. He was not sure. He
waited. It seemed an age while the tug climbed to the top of the next
comber. Slowly, slowly the buff funnel again came into view, and then
as the tug still climbed he saw it all--a white, b