Blow the Man Down - A Romance of the Coast

Lapse of time ceased to have significance. Every now and then the hammer

slipped and bruised his hand cruelly. But he did not feel the hurt. Both

tools wavered in his grasp. He struck a desperate--a despairing blow and

the hammer and chisel dropped. He knew that he had finished the fourth

side. He fell across Polly Candage's lap and she helped him to his

knees.

"I'm done, men," he gasped. "All together with those joists! Strike

together! Right above my head."

He heard the skipper count one--two--three. He heard the concerted blow.

The planks did not give way.

"We don't seem to have no strength left," explained the mate, in hoarse

tones.

They struck again, but irregularly.

"It's our lives--our lives, men!" cried Mayo. "Ram it to her!"

"Here's one for you, Captain Mayo," said Candage, and he thrust a length

of plank into the groping hands.

"Make it together, this time--together!" commanded Mayo. "Hard--one,

two, three!"

They drove their battering-rams up against the prisoning roof. Fury and

despair were behind their blow.

The glory of light flooded into their blinking eyes.

The section had given way!

Mayo went first and he snapped out with almost the violence of a cork

popping from a bottle. He felt the rush of the imprisoned air past him

as he emerged. Instantly he turned and thrust down his hands and pulled

the girl up into the open and the others followed, the lumber pushing

under their feet.

It seemed to Captain Mayo, after those few frenzied moments of escape,

that he had awakened from a nightmare; he found himself clinging to the

schooner's barnacled keel, his arm holding Polly Candage from sliding

down over the slimy bottom into the sea.

"Good jeero! We've been in there all night," bawled Captain Candage. He

lay sprawled on the bottom of the Polly, his hornbeam hands clutching

the keel, his face upraised wonderingly to the skies that were flooded

with the glory of the morning. Otie and Dolph were beside him, mouths

open, gulping in draughts of the air as if they were fish freshly drawn

from the ocean depths.

There was a long silence after the skipper's ejaculation.

Thoughts, rather than words, fitted that sacred moment of their

salvation.

The five persons who lay there on the bottom of the schooner stared at

the sun in its cloudless sky and gazed off across the sea whose blue was

shrouded by the golden haze of a perfect summer's day. Only a lazy roll

was left of the sudden turbulence of the night before. A listless breeze

with a fresh tang of salt in it lapped the surface of the long,

slow surges, and the facets of the ripples flashed back the sunlight

cheerily.