ry of effort: a sea sent him on his
knees, and yet he lay hack against the inrush of water, and hauled with
all the weight of body and arms.

"Haul, my men! A good life is at the end of that line. Haul! the ice may
congeal his pulses before you get at him! Haul! oh, haul!"

The skipper sprang to the grating abaft the wheel.

"Here he is. Glory be to God! Are you right, sir?"

No answer.

"My God! are you sure, skipper?"

"Sure. Look!"

Ferrier saw an object like a mass of seaweed, but the night was so
pitchy that no outline could be made out.

"Who durst try to pass a line under his arms?"

"Hand here, skipper; I will."

"Oh, Lewis! Keep nerve and eye steady. The graves are twenty fathoms
below."

Lennard was inert, and no one could tell how he held on until he was
flung on the deck.

"Lend us that binnacle lamp, Jim. Turn it on him."

Then it was seen that Tom might have been hauled up without putting
Ferrier in peril, for the rope was twice coiled under his arms and
loosely knotted in front; he had taken that precaution after seeing Bob
fall. Moreover, strange to say, his teeth were locked in the rope, for
he had laid hold with the last effort of despair.

The wind volleyed; the darkness remained impenetrable, and every sea
that came was a Niagara; yet the gallant smack stood to it, and Tom
Lennard slumbered after the breath came back to him. His ribs had stood
the strain of that rope, but he had really been semi-strangled, and he
was marked with two lurid, extravasated bands round his chest. He never
spoke before falling asleep; he only pressed Ferrier's hand and pointed,
with a smile, upward.

"If it goes on like this, sir, there won't be many of us left by the
morning."

"No, skipper. I hope the men will secure themselves like us. Mr. Lennard
had a near thing. He has a jaw like a walrus, or his teeth must have
gone."

So, in fitful whispers, the grim scraps of talk went on while the blare
of the trumpets of the Night was loosened over the sea.

"Look--over the port-side, there. It's beginning."

Ferrier could make out nothing until the skipper gave him the exact line
to look on. Then he saw a Something that seemed to wallow darkly on a
dark tumble of criss-cross seas.

"He's bottom up, sir. If we'd been running and gone into him, we should
have been at rest soon."

"How beautifully we are behaving, skipper. I suppose there's no chance
of our going like that?"

"Not without something h