"Ay, ay, sir," came a voice from the darkness of the main-deck, followed by the hasty pounding of feet.
"All the same, young man," said Brodie, turning to Jim, "you'd no business to be looking there. Now get on—"
"And look, sir — a flashing light, right under the star. Port quarter!"
"Right! Keep your glass on it while I try to pick it up. Count the flashes and the interval."
"There it goes again, sir!"
"Got it! Now count."
As soon as the brief wink was gone, Jim began to count, using the old dodge of saying: "I reckon one, I reckon two, I reckon three," so as to keep pace with the seconds, until the lonely gleam shone again. "Thirty, sir. Single flash every thirty seconds."
"What ? Can't be. Check it again while I have a look at the chart." He tore to the hatchway, stepped over the high coaming, and fell with a sliding crash the whole length of the ladder. For suddenly, and with a dull, brutal shock, Sardis stopped her free, headlong career through the dark.
Things happened with a flashing violent swiftness, so that a year of life seemed to be contained in a minute. Jim saw the deathly-white face of the helmsman lit from below by the glow of the binnacle-light. The man was spinning the now useless wheel and screaming at him: "Sir! sir! She's on the sand, she's on the sand!" In the same moment there were two sharp cracks like gunfire as the topsails burst with the extra weight of the wind, and only a second later the huge sea, which had been slowly overtaking them while they were under way, thundered, feet thick, over the taffrail, racing forward with savage speed. Without thinking, Jim leapt for his life at the base of the mizen, and was just able to swing his feet on to the pin-rail four feet off the deck as the vicious tide reached him. The helmsman was not so well-placed, nor so agile. Jim saw the water pluck him like a matchstick from his grasp of the spokes and hurl him sickeningly against the forward rail of the poop.
Jim was at his side by the time the water had cleared through the scuppers. Blood ran from a huge dark cut on the man's forehead, and the whole head was bent back, like that of a broken puppet.
It was the first dead body Jim Robbins had ever seen.
Chapter IV
For a few seconds there was stillness on the poop, as the sick, shivering apprentice pulled uselessly at the shoulders of the dead seaman. Then, with a babel of voices, Brodie, White and the Captain burst out of the hatchway, the two latter still hauling on their watch-coats. The two Mates made a simultaneous rush for the voice-pipe to the engine-room.
"Right, lad, I'll take over now!" said White, as Brodie blew the whistle to attract attention. "Engine-room? Full astern — hard as you can go. She's on the sand." He straightened up and turned his tense staring face to the Second. "She'll never come off against this blow. Still, we got to try everything. How's the tide?"
"Falling. Half-ebb. Low-water half past three."
"We've just a chance. If she won't come off, we'll let go port anchor — give it plenty o' cable; she might come off at high-water if it'll hold, and the wind eases. Right, then?"
"Ay, ay, sir." Brodie dashed away down the ladder and along the main-deck, shouting as he ran: "Bosun! Cable party muster on the foc's'le. Clear away port anchor!"
Slowly the real meaning of what had happened sank into the numbness of Jim's mind: Brodie had said "Ay, ay, sir," to the Mate. He'd never called him "sir" before. Then White was...?
Cameron, too, was coming round from the shock which had left him grey-faced and speechless at first. He spoke with a desperate attempt at his old swagger: "Mr White, I should like to know the meaning—"
But he got no further, for the Mate swung his powerful shoulders round and thrust his face into the Captain's with a look of terrible anger that Jim was to remember all his life. He was sobbing with fury: "Get out o' my sight! Get out o' my sight, you daft murdering old swine! I haven't time to talk to you. With your 'Company this' an' 'Company that' — see where you've landed us! What about all them old folks and nippers down below? Has your Company given us enough lifeboats for them? Has it?" He seized the lapels of Cameron's coat and shook him like a rat, shouting with a choking fury: "Go on — has it? Has it?" He sent him reeling back against the idle wheel. "Now get out o' my sight! You're not fit to be up here. So help me, if I see you on deck again I'll smash your cocky face to pulp. Now, get below." Without a word Cameron left the deck. Two minutes of time had broken him; for the pitiful slanting stoop of his shoulders showed that he would never give a man an order again.
Mr White had no time for thought or pity, however. He turned to Jim: "Here — you! Get the lead; drop the line straight down and tell me if she's moving." Jim snatched up the coil of rope and lowered the seven-pound cylinder of lead into the sea until — all too soon — he felt it touch the bottom. The screw was now threshing round at its full revolutions, shaking and jarring the whole ship. From time to time the whole mass of the ship was lifted bodily by the sea and then dropped with a cruel shuddering jolt on to the hard sand. As Jim looked down the vertical lead-line he could see a foaming soupy brown tide flowing forward along the ship's side. Yet the angle of the line never shifted; she was fast.
"She shifted at all?"
"No, sir. Not moved."
"Very good." White moved heavily to the voice-pipe and spoke down it quietly. "Stop engines. Keep up your head of steam." And quietly and wearily he spoke into the darkness forward. "Pass the word to Mr Brodie, let go port anchor. Veer cable to two shackles on deck."
It was over for the moment. Nobody could do anything now to shift the Sardis. Looking at his watch, Jim was amazed to find that only twelve minutes had elapsed since that hideous dragging grasp had robbed the ship of her life. Even so, with the tide ebbing at full speed, the water-level would have dropped nine inches in that time, and every inch as it slipped away caused more tons of Sardis's weight to rest on the sand. Nothing in the world would budge her an inch now.
From away up forward in the darkness he heard the dull roar of the cable in the hawsepipe as Brodie let go. He guessed what was in the new Captain's mind: when the tide rose again and Sardis refloated, she would clearly be driven farther and farther on to the sandbank. If she paid out cable as she went, for a while, there might be a chance of the anchor holding when she stopped paying out; then she might float off as the tide came surging up. The look on White's face told Jim that it was a desperate hope.
"Not much more we can do, mister," said White as Brodie came up from the main-deck. "One hand anchor-watch; one hand up here; fire a distress-rocket now, and every hour after until daylight. Rest of'em better turn in — don't know where or when they'll get the chance again, poor swabs. All hands on deck six o'clock. Should start to float about six-thirty. Tell Bosun I want 'em to come aft for a few words first thing. Get that fixed, and you and me'll get the chart and try and see where the hell we are. Here — you! Nip down and get me the North Foreland to Orfordness chart; pin it on a board or something. And get a light, too."
Jim returned to the deck to find it deserted except for White and Brodie, who had now lit their pipes. The same savage wind still flung its gusts out of the north-east, but overhead the whole windward hemisphere of the sky was alight with stars, and in a moment the moon would be uncovered. The sea-noise was more muffled, and he saw with awe that the huge steep waves were now curling and shattering long before they reached the ship. Soon they would have less than six feet of water around them. And she needed seventeen-and-a-half to float in.