Lapse of time ceased to have significance. Every now and then the hammer
slipped and bruised his hand cruelly. But he did not feel the hurt. Both
tools wavered in his grasp. He struck a desperate--a despairing blow and
the hammer and chisel dropped. He knew that he had finished the fourth
side. He fell across Polly Candage's lap and she helped him to his
knees.
"I'm done, men," he gasped. "All together with those joists! Strike
together! Right above my head."
He heard the skipper count one--two--three. He heard the concerted blow.
The planks did not give way.
"We don't seem to have no strength left," explained the mate, in hoarse
tones.
They struck again, but irregularly.
"It's our lives--our lives, men!" cried Mayo. "Ram it to her!"
"Here's one for you, Captain Mayo," said Candage, and he thrust a length
of plank into the groping hands.
"Make it together, this time--together!" commanded Mayo. "Hard--one,
two, three!"
They drove their battering-rams up against the prisoning roof. Fury and
despair were behind their blow.
The glory of light flooded into their blinking eyes.
The section had given way!
Mayo went first and he snapped out with almost the violence of a cork
popping from a bottle. He felt the rush of the imprisoned air past him
as he emerged. Instantly he turned and thrust down his hands and pulled
the girl up into the open and the others followed, the lumber pushing
under their feet.
It seemed to Captain Mayo, after those few frenzied moments of escape,
that he had awakened from a nightmare; he found himself clinging to the
schooner's barnacled keel, his arm holding Polly Candage from sliding
down over the slimy bottom into the sea.
"Good jeero! We've been in there all night," bawled Captain Candage. He
lay sprawled on the bottom of the Polly, his hornbeam hands clutching
the keel, his face upraised wonderingly to the skies that were flooded
with the glory of the morning. Otie and Dolph were beside him, mouths
open, gulping in draughts of the air as if they were fish freshly drawn
from the ocean depths.
There was a long silence after the skipper's ejaculation.
Thoughts, rather than words, fitted that sacred moment of their
salvation.
The five persons who lay there on the bottom of the schooner stared at
the sun in its cloudless sky and gazed off across the sea whose blue was
shrouded by the golden haze of a perfect summer's day. Only a lazy roll
was left of the sudden turbulence of the night before. A listless breeze
with a fresh tang of salt in it lapped the surface of the long,
slow surges, and the facets of the ripples flashed back the sunlight
cheerily.