Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/265

Rh and showed a fair broadside to the assault of the other ship, which, wholly at fault, had begun to swing in fatal blundering, as if trying to pass under the Wasdale's stern.

The blow came, therefore, a little abaft the bridge. Succeeding a prodigious crash and rending of plates came a moment of impressive stillness, as the Wasdale tried to right herself from the shock, and then a foolish clatter of falling china and glass.

"He's waltzed clean through our pantry," said the third officer to himself.

Captain Arendt had only to rise from the planks where he had been flung, to command a bird's-eye view of the disaster. He looked down on the crumpled bows of the other ship, driven twenty feet into his own saloon-deck, and making a trumpet of his hands, shouted across to the other bridge, on which he could see figures moving like agitated black smudges:

"You is cut us half in two. Keep going ahead. Don't back out, vatever you do. Keep the hole plugged until I gets my peoples off."