ulders; and to this
overture he responded with great intelligence by catching hold of his
captain round the waist.

They stood clasped thus in the blind night, bracing each other against
the wind, cheek to cheek and lip to ear, in the manner of two hulks
lashed stem to stern together.

And Jukes heard the voice of his commander hardly any louder than
before, but nearer, as though, starting to march athwart the prodigious
rush of the hurricane, it had approached him, bearing that strange
effect of quietness like the serene glow of a halo.

"D'ye know where the hands got to?" it asked, vigorous and evanescent at
the same time, overcoming the strength of the wind, and swept away from
Jukes instantly.

Jukes didn't know. They were all on the bridge when the real force of
the hurricane struck the ship. He had no idea where they had crawled to.
Under the circumstances they were nowhere, for all the use that could be
made of them. Somehow the Captain's wish to know distressed Jukes.

"Want the hands, sir?" he cried, apprehensively.

"Ought to know," asserted Captain MacWhirr. "Hold hard."

They held hard. An outburst of unchained fury, a vicious rush of the
wind absolutely steadied the ship; she rocked only, quick and light like
a child's cradle, for a terrific moment of suspense, while the whole
atmosphere, as it seemed, streamed furiously past her, roaring away from
the tenebrous earth.

It suffocated them, and with eyes shut they tightened their grasp.
What from the magnitude of the shock might have been a column of water
running upright in the dark, butted against the ship, broke short,
and fell on her bridge, crushingly, from on high, with a dead burying
weight.

A flying fragment of that collapse, a mere splash, enveloped them in one
swirl from their feet over their heads, filling violently their ears,
mouths and nostrils with salt water. It knocked out their legs, wrenched
in haste at their arms, seethed away swiftly under their chins; and
opening their eyes, they saw the piled-up masses of foam dashing to and
fro amongst what looked like the fragments of a ship. She had given way
as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded, too, before the
tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate
plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins.

The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back
where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was han