breath with excitement. The three boys raced down to the
beach now and joined them.

"Crickey!" yelped little Isadore Phelps. "We're almost too late to
see the fun!"

"Hush!" commanded Ruth, sharply.

"Your idea of fun, young man, is very much warped," Madge Steele added.

"Haven't they got the wrecked people off?" demanded Tom, in wonder.

At the moment an added Coston burned up on the wreck. Its uncertain
glare revealed the shrouds and torn lower rigging. They saw several
figures--outlined in the glaring light--lashed to the stays and broken
spars. The craft was a schooner, lumber-laden, and the sea had now
cast her so far over on her beam-ends that her deck was like a wall
confronting the shore. Against this background the crew were visible,
clinging desperately to hand-holds, or lashed to the rigging.

And a great cry went suddenly up from the crowd ashore. "There's women
aboard her--poor lost souls!" quavered one old dame who had seen many a
terrifying wreck along the coast.

Ruth Fielding's sharper eyes had discovered that one of the figures
clinging to the wreck was too small for a grown person.

"It's a child!" she murmured. "It's a girl. Oh, Helen! there's a
girl--no older than we--on that wreck!"

The words of the men standing about them proved Ruth's statement to be
true. Others had descried the girl's figure in that perilous situation.
There was a woman, too, and seven men. Seven men were ample to man a
schooner of her size, and probably the other two were the captain's
wife and daughter.

But if escape to the shore depended upon the work of the lifeboat and
her crew, the castaways were in peril indeed, for the boat was coming
shoreward now with a rush. With her came the tossing, charging timbers
washed from the deck load. The sea between the reef and the beach was
now a seething mass of broken and splintering planks and beams. No craft
could live in such a seaway.

But Ruth and her friends were suddenly conscious of a peril nearer at
hand. The broken lifeboat with its crew was being swept shoreward upon
a great wave, and with the speed of an express train. The great, curling,
foam-streaked breaker seemed to hurl the heavy boat through the air.

"They'll be killed! Oh, they will!" shrieked Mary Cox.

The long craft, half-smothered in foam, and accompanied by the plunging
timbers from the wreck, darted shoreward with increasing velocity. One
moment it was high above their heads, with the curlin