ith it went a figure. Rainey caught sight of a ghastly face, a mouth
that shouted vainly for help in the pandemonium, and was instantly
stoppered with strangling brine, pop-eyes appealing in awful fright as
Sandy was washed away in the cascade. The halyards were held on the pin
with a turn and twist that Rainey swiftly loosened, lifting the coil
free, making a fast loop, and thrusting head and arms through it as he
flung himself after the roustabout.

Even as he dived he heard the bellow of Lund, knowing instinctively the
peril of the schooner by its actions, though ignorant of the accident.

"Back that jib! Back it, blast yore eyes! Ba-ck--"

Then Rainey was clubbing his way through the race of water to where he
glimpsed an upflung arm. Sandy was in oilskins and sea-boots, he had
hardly a chance to save himself, however expert. And it flashed over
Rainey's mind that, like many sailors, the lad had boasted that he could
not swim. His boots would pull him under as soon as the force of the
waves, that were tossing him from crest to crest, should be suspended.
Rainey himself was borne on their thrust, clogged by his own equipment,
linked to life only by the halyard coil.

A great bulk wallowed just before him, the helpless body of the bowhead
whale, the killers darting in a mad melee for its head. Then a figure
was literally hurled upon the slippery mass of the mammal, its gray
belly plain in the welter, a living raft against which the waves broke
and tossed their spray.

Clawing frantically, Sandy clutched at the base of the enormous pectoral
fin, clinging with maniacal strength, mad with fear. Striking out to
little purpose, save to help buoy himself, blinded by the flying scud
and broken crests, Rainey felt himself upreared, swept impotently on and
slammed against the slimy hulk, just close enough to Sandy to grasp him
by the collar, as the whale, stung by a killer's tearing at its oily
tongue, flailed with its fin and the two of them slid down its body,
deep under water.

Rainey fought against the suffocation and the fierce desire to gasp and
relieve his tortured lungs. The lad's weight seemed to be carrying him
down as if he was a thing of lead, but Rainey would not relax his grip.
He could not. He had centered all his energy upon the desire to save
Sandy, and his nerve centers were still tense to that last conscious
demand.

There came a swift, painful constriction of his chest that his failing
senses interpr