His Unknown Wife, Louis Tracy [best black authors .TXT] 📗
- Author: Louis Tracy
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Then he ran after the others.
Poor fellow! He little dreamed that he was repaying a thousand-fold the few extra days of life the good-looking vaquero had given him.
Almost immediately the ship struck. There was a fearsome crash of rending plates and torn ribs, the great vessel reeled over, struck again and bumped clear of the outer reef.
Now, too late, the after anchor lodged in a sunken crevice; the cable did not yield, because the vessel was sucked into a sort of backwash and driven, bow on, close to an apparently unscalable cliff.
She settled rapidly. As it happened a submerged rock smashed her keel-plate beneath the engine-room, and the engines, together with the stout framework to which the superstructure was bolted amidships, became anchored there, offering a new obstacle to the onward race of the seas pouring over the reef.
Every boat was either smashed instantaneously or wrenched bodily from its davits. Two-thirds of the hull fell away almost at once, the forecastle tilting towards the cliff, and the poop being swept into deep water.
With the after part went at least half the ship’s company, their last cries of despair being smothered by the continuous roar of the wind and the thunder of the waves. The bridge, with the rooms immediately below, remained fairly upright, but the smoking-room, and officers’ quarters close to” it, were swept by water breast high.
Some one-who it was will never be known had ordered the passengers to run into the smoking-room when the forward cable parted. Now, with the magnificent courage invariably shown by American sailors even when the gates of death gape wide before their eyes, the first and second officers contrived to hoist the two girls to the chartroom behind the bridge.
Sturgess, behaving with great gallantry, helped the women first, and then their father, who was floating in the room, to reach the only available gangway. Others followed, but the difficulty of rescue-if such a sorrowful transition might be called a rescue-was enhanced by the noise and sudden darkness.
Ever the central citadel of the Southern Cross was sinking lower. Ever the leaping waves and their clouds of spray tended more and more to shut out the light.
Seven people were plucked from immediate death in this fashion. All told, officers, crew and passengers, the survivors of seventy-four souls numbered twelve.
There was a thirteenth, because Maseden was lying high and dry in his bunk. But of him they took no count.
They gathered in the chartroom. Those who still retained their senses tried to revive the more fortunate ones to whom was vouchsafed a merciful oblivion of their common plight. Even in the temporary haven of the chartroom the conditions quickly savored of utter misery. The windows were blown away. The doors were jammed open by the warping of the deck. Wind, waves and sheets of spray seemed to vie with demoniac energy as to which could be most cruel and deadly. The ceaseless warping and working of what was left of the ship presaged complete collapse at any moment, and the din of the reef was stupefying.
Still, the captain did not abate one jot of his cool demeanor. He eyed the sea, the rocks, the remains of his ship and the beetling crags from which he was cut off by sixty feet of raging water.
Then he deliberately turned his back on it all. Going to a locker, he produced a screwdriver and began methodically drawing the screws of the door-hinges.
The chief officer thought that the other man’s brain had yielded to the stress.
“What are you doing, sir?” he said, placing a hand gently on his friend’s shoulder.
“We haven’t a ten-million to one chance of remaining here till the gale gives out,” was the calm answer, “but we may as well rig up some sort of protection from the weather. There are four lockers and four doors. Let’s block up those broken windows as well as we can.”
A curiously admiring light shone in the chief officer’s eyes. He said nothing, but helped. Soon a corner was completely walled. They decided it was better to have one section thoroughly shielded than the whole only partially.
They made a quick job of it. The girls, Mr. Gray, and two men recovering consciousness were allotted to the angle.
Then the captain opened one of the three bottles of claret stored in a locker, and portioned out the contents among the survivors.
There was no need to measure the share of a heavily-built Spaniard who was reputed to be a wealthy rancher from the Argentine. His spine was broken when the ship lurched over the reef. He was found dead when they tried to move him to the sheltered corner.
And now a pall of darkness spread swiftly over the face of the waters. The tide fell, but the ship sank with it. She no longer rocked and shook under the blows of the waves. It seemed as though she knew herself crippled beyond all hope of succor, and only awaited another tide to meet annihilation.
Wind and sea were more furious than ever. In all likelihood, the gale would blow itself out next day. But long before dawn the rising tide would have made short work of what was left of the Southern Cross.
Never was a small company of Christian people in a more hopeless position. Every boat was gone. They had no food. They were wet to the skin, and pierced with bitter cold. Even the hardy captain’s teeth chattered as he took a pipe from his pocket, rolled some tobacco between the palms of his hands, and said smilingly to those near him:
“This is one of the occasions when a watertight pipe-lighter is a real treasure. Who’d like a smoke? You must find your own pipes. I can supply some ‘baccy and a light!”
Maseden was badly hurt and quite stunned. Of that there could be no manner of doubt. He was blissfully unaware of the destruction of the ship, and did not regain his senses until long after the captain and some few of the men gathered in the dismantled chartroom had indulged in what was to prove their last pipeful of tobacco.
Even when a species of ordered perception was restored he was wholly unable during an hour or more to collect his wits sufficiently to understand just what had happened.
Certain phenomena were vaguely disturbing; that was all. He knew, for instance, that the Southern Cross was wrecked, because the deck was tilted permanently at an alarming angle. As the downward slope was forward, however, and his bunk lay across it and on the forward side of the door the physical outcome was by no means unpleasant, since his body was wedged comfortably between the mattress and the bulkhead.
He was dry and warm. The weather-proof garments of the pampas were admirably adapted to resist exposure, while the pitch of the deck, aided by the conformation of the bows, diminished the striking power of the waves and carried the spray and broken water clean over the remains of the forecastle.
Maseden’s position resembled that of a man ensconced in a dry niche of a cave behind a waterfall. So long as he did not move and the cavern held intact he was safe and comfortable. Happily, a long time elapsed between the first glimmer of consciousness and the moment when the knowledge was borne in on him that he was actually beset by immediate and most deadly peril.
He imagined that the ship had been cast ashore after he met with some rather serious accident, that some kind Samaritan had tucked him into his own berth, and that, in due course, some one would look in on him with a cheery inquiry as to how he was faring. His answer would have been that his head ached abominably, that his mouth and throat were on fire, and that a long drink of cold water was the one thing needed to send him to sleep and speedy recovery.
He did not realize that when he dropped face downward into the folds of the sail he had swallowed a quantity of salt water lodged there instantly by the pelting seas. It was not until he moved, and yielded to a fit of vomiting, which relieved the pain in his head and cleared his faculties, that the dreadful truth began to dawn in his mind.
Once, however, the process of clear reasoning set in, it developed rapidly. He noticed, in the first instance, that the angle of the deck was becoming steeper. It was strange, he thought, that although the light was failing, no one came near. His ears, too, told him that seas were still hammering furiously on every side.
Finally, a marked movement of the forecastle as it slipped over a smooth rock race, owing to the increase of dead weight brought about by the falling tide, induced a species of alarmed curiosity which proved a most potent tonic. At one moment feeling hardly able to move, the next he was scrambling out of the bunk and climbing crab-like through the doorway.
Then he saw that the forecastle deck had been torn away in line with the forward bulkhead of the fore hold. With some difficulty, being still physically weak and shaken, he raised head and shoulders above this jagged edge and peered over.
Then he understood. The ship was in pieces on the reef. Two bits of her still remained; the forecastle, a stubborn wedge nearly always the last part of a steel-built vessel to collapse, and the bridge, with its backing of the chart house. All else had gone—the funnels had fallen an hour earlier.
Even the steel plates and stout wood work of the superstructure had melted away from the six strong ribs to which the sunken engines were bolted, leaving the bridge and chart house in air.
Already, too, one of the six pillars which had proved the salvation of that forlorn aerie had yielded to the strain and snapped. In the half light it was difficult to discern just what support was given to the squat rectangle of the chart-house; Maseden had to look long and steadily through the flying scud before he gathered the exact facts.
The upper deck of the forecastle shut off any glimpse of the cliffs. All he could see was the reef, much more visible now, but still partially submerged by every sea; beyond it, a howling wilderness of broken water, and in the midst of this depressing picture, the ghost-like chartchart househouse and bridge.
But he recalled vividly enough the sight of an awesome precipice close at hand before something had hit him and robbed him of senses. If the ship, or what was left of her, was lodged on the reef towards which she was being driven at the time of his mishap, the shore could not be far distant.
Within a foot of where he lay on the deck,clinging to it as a man might save himself from falling off the steeply-pitched roof of a house, was the big bole of the foremast, on which the rings of the sails formed a sort of ladder. He pulled himself up, stretched his body along the mast in the opposite direction, and made out the uneven summit of the cliff above the straight line of the upper deck.
He was exposed to the weather here, but the waves were not breaking across the forecastle now, and the spray and biting wind tended rather to dissipate the feeling
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