Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/309

Rh "She's in the breakers on the weather side of the Point. The Boy guessed right. Breaking up fast, she is. Hustle up the gun."

When they sighted the stranded schooner even Brainard, who had foreseen her plight, was amazed at the quick fury of her destruction. The black lump of her hulk lay in a surf which broke sheer over it, and the stump of her mainmast rolled in appealing gestures to the sky. The first shot was fired dead against the wind, and the line fell short. A second and a third failed, and they did not even know whether life was aboard the wreck. At last a quartering shot sent the line across the schooner, and there came feeble twitches, electric pulsations that sent their message to the men ashore as if hands had been clasped across the boiling inferno of white water.

The wreck was breaking up fast. Her timbers strewed the beach, and drifted menacingly in the surf. But with slow, halting effort, the whip-line followed the slender cord of the projectile, and after that the heavy hawser trailed out into the