hrust into one of the many gaps between the enrockment
blocks,--spaces from two to three feet wide,--and her bow timbers thus
take the shock, there was a living chance to save her.

A cry from Baxter, who had dropped the tiller and was scrambling over
the stone-covered deck to the bowsprit, reached the captain's ears, but
he never altered his position. What he was to do must be done surely.
Baxter didn't count,--wasn't in the back of his head. There were plenty
of willing hands to pick up Baxter and his men.

Then a thing happened which, if I had not seen it, I would never have
believed possible. The water cushion of the outsuck helped,--so did the
huge roller which, in its blind rage, had underestimated the distance
between its lift and the wide-open jaws of the rock,--as a maddened
bull often underestimates the length of its thrust, its horns falling
short of the matador.

Whatever the cause, Captain Joe watched his chance, sprang to the
outermost rock, and, bracing his great snubbing posts of legs against
its edge, reversed his body, caught the wavering sloop on his broad
shoulders, close under her bowsprit chains, and pushed back with all
his might.

Then began a struggle between the strength of the man and the lunge of
the sea. With every succeeding onslaught, and before the savage roller
could fully lift the staggering craft to hurl her to destruction,
Captain Joe, with the help of the outsuck, would shove her back from
the waiting rocks. This was repeated again and again,--the men in the
rescuing yawl meanwhile bending every muscle to carry out the captain's
commands.

Sometimes his head was free enough to shout his orders, and sometimes
both man and bow were smothered in suds.

"Keep that fall clear!" would come his order "Stand ready to catch the
yawl! Shut that--" here a souse would stop his breath,--"shut that
furnace door! Do ye want the steam out of the b'iler?"--etc., etc.

That the slightest misstep on the slimy rocks on which his feet were
braced meant sending him under the sloop's bow where he would be caught
between her forefoot and the rocks and ground into pulp concerned him
as little as did the fact that Baxter and his men had crawled along the
bowsprit over his head and had dropped to the island without wetting
their shoes. That his diving suit was full of water and he soaking wet
to the skin, made not the slightest difference to him--no more than it
would to a Newfoundland dog saving a chi