"Come, now, boys!" he cried. "Pull! Heave-ho, there! Altogether, lift her! Pull!"
He strained at the rope which he and two others held; the rest--each rope now held by three or four men--bent their back to the labor. As the ropes drew tense, the canoes crowded and jostled together. Those men who were not at the ropes, worked with the paddles to keep the boats apart, so that the ropes should not foul or bind. And in an irregular ring, all round the active canoes, the others drew. Lighted by so many torches, the misty waters glittered as broken waves, thrown out by the agitation of the canoes, radiated in all directions.
"Pull, boys, pull!" shouted the engineer again. "Up she comes! Now, all together!"
Came a jerk, a long and dragging resistance, then a terrific straining on the many cords. The score and a half of men breathed hard; on their naked arms the veins and muscles swelled; the torchlight gleamed blue on their sweating faces and bodies.
And spontaneously, as at all times of great endeavor among the Folk, a wailing song arose; it echoed through the gloom; it grew, taken up by the outlying boats; and in the eternal dark of the Abyss it rose, uncanny, soul-shaking, weird beyond all telling.
Stern felt the shuddering chills chase each other up and down his spine, playing a nervous accompaniment to their chant.
"Gad!" he muttered, shivering, "what a situation for a hard-headed, practical man like me! It's more like a scene from some weird pipe-dream magazine story of the remote past than solid reality!"
Again the Folk strained at the ropes, Stern with them; and now the great weight below was surely rising, inch by inch, up, up, toward the black and gleaming surface of the abysmal sea.
Stern's heart was pounding wildly. If only--incredible as it seemed--the Pauillac really were there at the end of the converging ropes; and if it were still in condition to be repaired again! If only the hook and the hard-taxed ropes held!
"Up, boys! Heave 'er!" he shouted, pulling till his muscles hardened like steel, and the canoe--balanced, though it was by five oarsmen and the patriarch all at the other gunwale--tipped crazily. "Pull! Pull!"
Beatrice sprang to the rope. Unable to restrain herself, she, too, laid hold on the taut, dripping cord; and her white hands, firm, muscular, shapely, gripped with a strength one could never have guessed lay in them.
And now the ropes were sliding up out of the water, faster, ever faster; and higher rose the song of all those laboring Folk and all who watched from the outlying ring of boats.