Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/205

Rh Wilson dragged himself after him, and pitched against a splintered mass of planking upended against the wheel. They listened and heard a steamer's imploring whistle, and one faint cry off to leeward. "Pop" Markle groaned as he fumbled in the darkness and laboriously passed a tangle of line around the wreck of the skylight cover to which Wilson was clinging.

"Hang on, sonny," he gasped. "I've made the buoy fast to the loose timber. We'll go off together with the next sea, sure. My God! here it comes."

The dying schooner seemed to sink from beneath them, and clinging to their frail bit of a raft, they were spun off to leeward in the arms of the sea that swamped the rock-ballasted Albatross. Turned over and over, the two men fought for breath until the skylight cover righted, and they came to the surface. They slid swiftly into a murky hollow, and were borne to the tattered crest whose froth was strangling.

But the wind was falling fast. Such seas as those which had broken over