Brodie was deathly pale, his jaw muscles clamped rigidly. "Right you are, then — I warned you." He nodded towards the mob's leader; the seaman on his left leapt forward. He seized the man's jacket with his left hand; his raised right hand grasped a polished belaying-pin that he had hidden until now. There was a dead crack of wood on bone, and the leader pitched limply among the crowded feet. There was a furious murmur of anger, which was silenced in a gasp as the threatening half-circle saw the gun in Brodie's hand.
"Now you can shut up and wait," he said. "The boats are being got ready now." He looked at the nearest ranks of able-bodied men with bitter scorn and played his trump card. "I suppose you gentlemen in the front are getting ready to be first away?" There was an angry clamour from the rear; the old and young were thrust to the front, and the committee of resistance melted away. An excited seaman leaned down to calclass="underline" "Mr Brodie, sir! Captain's compliments, first boatload on deck if you please."
As the first thirty, mostly mothers with babies in arms, filed past Jim, the whole ship shook and shifted to another savage blow. Again the crowd swayed helplessly; this time there were crashes as piles of luggage and trunks were thrown to the deck. "Not a bit too soon," said Brodie quietly to the seaman on his left. "That was a good 'un you gave him. Can't see him on his feet yet."
Chapter VI
Cameron was not quick to obey the new Captain's curt message, but he did obey it, and stood silently and passively before Mr White.
"Right, Cameron. I'm giving you a chance to save some of the lives you've thrown away. God knows I'd like to shoot you like a mad dog — but I can't afford to. You were a decent enough seaman once, they say. Are you willing to take charge of the first lifeboat away, and act as guide to the others? Or do I have to send MacDougall?'
There was a long pause as Cameron, half-turned away, stood savouring the bitter humiliation of White's question. Then he turned his back entirely and looked out to leeward: "I'll do it," he said.
"Right. Now I'll tell you what I want you to do. You'll have a compass in your boat: I want you to head due north, and keep wind and sea on your starboard bow. I'm putting two seamen and two able-bodied passengers in each boat, so you should have enough oarsmen to do that. Tide and wind'll be setting you into the estuary at about three or four knots, so if you steer north you should cross right over the Long Sand into Black Deep. Plenty of water over the sand for small boats. Then once the tide falls you're in sheltered water — and on a shipping route too. If you can last two hours you should be all right. Got it?"
Cameron gave the smallest of nods, his head averted, and descended to the main-deck to meet the first party of white-faced, terrified passengers. One by one the boats were loaded; hard-case seamen, doomed to remain aboard and face an icy death, nevertheless comforted the old folk with clumsy tenderness, and joked and played with the small children to distract them from their terror. It was half-past seven on a clear, bitter morning when the last boat, with MacDougall in command, let go and drifted rapidly away to the south-west, rowing laboriously and clumsily to join the straggling armada now lost out there in the half-light.
As the last boat's painter fell into the water, a gloomy, despairing emptiness settled on the men and women who remained. The score of seamen stared silently out to leeward; a few stokers were busy dumping buckets of glowing coals over the side, for the Captain had ordered the fires to be drawn; knots of black-clad emigrants — mostly the able-bodied and childless — looked with dread at the even grey ranks of seas that marched at them ceaselessly out of the north-east.
White felt pressing on his shoulders not only his own despair, but that of all his companions in disaster. Action was needed; he forced himself to smile and rub his hands together: "Right, now we'll think about ourselves, lads. Mr Brodie! On the fo'c'sle, please: veer cable as she shifts up the shoal; we'll have her off yet! And Mr Brodie," he beckoned to the Mate to come closer, nodded towards the lifeless figure against the rail, and muttered: "And take that miserable spineless young gowk with you, for God's sake. Can't stand the sight of him any longer. He can point the cable for you." Thus Jim Robbins was soon leaning over the bulwark on the foc's'le, holding out a stiff arm to show the direction in which the anchor-cable was "growing".
As the cable grew taut, Brodie motioned to the hand on the brake of the cable-holder, and a few more fathoms of chain surged through the pipe. The man working the wheel of the brake was Able Seaman Jordan, who had so much enjoyed White's baiting of Jim. Now his harsh mahogany features were set grimly; like all the rest of the men, he knew that this was a slender help. Sand was wretched stuff for holding an anchor in a gale like that.
Soon the sun was up, the sky gathered colour and imparted it to the waves, giving the ruffled water to windward a magnificent dark blue. The sky was utterly clear, yet little met their eyes but heaving seas. Away down to leeward the desolate leaning masts of a wreck showed up sharply, and small specks were scattered on the sea around them — the lifeboats! It was hard to see clearly, as each speck was constantly appearing and vanishing as the huge troughs and crests rolled past; but a keen eye could see that several of the specks showed white and smooth — the upturned bottoms of capsized boats. Right away to the east could be seen in sharp silhouette the topsails of a barque running to the southward. Of the land nothing showed, save for a blue haze in the south that could have been the high ground of Thanet in Kent. And still the huge bitter wind howled at them out of the washed sky.
Half an hour passed. Time after time, Jim saw the chain grow taut as the ship drove farther on to the shoal, then slacken as more was paid out. Gradually even Jim was aware, however, that Sardis was moving less and less with every wave; the wind had now swung her round so that she was broadside-on to the cruel sledge-hammer seas. At first, she had lifted to them like a man cringing from a blow, her keel landing again and again with a hideous jar on the hard sand. Now she was lifeless and passive; unmoving.
"How's the cable now?" shouted Brodie into the wind.
"Still slack, sir — up and down," Jim replied. He felt a shoulder brush against his; Jordan had rushed across from his post on the brake to stare over the bulwark at the hanging cable.
"That's it, then," he said quietly. "Done for. Water's going in and out of her, same as if she was a lobster-pot. That'll break clean over her presently."
"Jordan!" Brodie was shouting angrily. "Get back to—" It was an order poor Brodie did not finish in this life. As he began to speak, Jim heard Jordan give a weird scream; the apprentice had a glimpse of a vast dark-blue slope above him, capped by a sliding avalanche of foam. Then the seaman flung him flat on his face under the shelter of the bulwark, and lay there piled on him, while tons of water shot in a solid stream across them three feet above their tense bodies. Almost extinguished by the roaring crash of the wave were the brief, terror-filled screams of the hard seamen who saw Death reaching out to touch them. Jim and Jordan lay stiffly, grasping with incredible strength whatever solid fitting came to hand. When, at last, they raised themselves from the streaming deck the foc's'le was empty of life; the whole of the starboard bulwark had been shorn off at deck level. Of the officer and three seamen nothing remained but a sodden cap, lodged in the machinery of the cable-holder.
Even in his deeply-shocked coma, now made worse by the horror of that moment, Jim felt a kind of awe that he was alive. Yet he was alive now in the way that a dumb animal is alive, and it was an animal instinct that made him stumble to his feet and start to make his way to the ladder which would lead him down on to the main-deck. A kind of unthinking urge drew him to join the crowd — the tightly-packed huddle of passengers and crew on the poop. He was at the head of the ladder when Jordan's great hand seized his upper arm, just as White had on the first night.