Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/54

36 toiling in flooding seas at hawsers lashed round two great turret guns. More than ever convinced by this escape that his eyes were needed on the bridge, Captain Kendrick stayed steadfast in his purpose. The two officers felt awe as they looked at him, that he should have sensed, where their eyes could not see, the danger they had shaved by a hair's breadth. Sometimes now his head fell forward, but the hand on the indicator lever was ever nervously alive to feel the ship and the raving seas, and he was snatching her from death, inch by inch and hour by hour.

the early hours of the storm, Arthur Valentine was battering like a shuttle-cock between the sides of his berth, sicker in mind than in body, for manifold terrors had come to prey upon him. Without confidence in the captain of the ship, he felt that his own cowardice was responsible for failure to act when the issue had been almost within his grasp. Through