Page:Silver Shoal Light.djvu/205

 "Two of them had cork jackets, and the others were clinging to them, kicking and fighting to keep up in the icy water. The captain was holding to an oar, swimming feebly. The whaleboat had been carried away. Jim—the keeper, I should say—hauled the men aboard the dory, so stiff and chilled that they could hardly help themselves. He managed to keep his lantern alight and the boat right side up till they all were aboard. The least exhausted of the five men pulled the other pair of oars with the keeper, and two more bailed steadily, for the dory shipped water at every stroke. The boat staggered on nobly, plunging and shaking herself free, and came in at last on the crest of a roller halfway up the rock. Perhaps I can trust Jim to go on now."

"Any one would suppose she'd been there!" her husband remarked. "Hasn't she a graphic style! Well, there's little more to narrate. The Coast Guard people came up the beach with their breeches-buoy apparatus after the schooner had broken in two. The crew of the Thomas J. would very likely have been at the bottom of the sea, if they'd waited. Instead of that, they were shivering around the lighthouse stove, wrapped in all sorts of queer blan-