"Yes, forward; it's opened up a little under the floor plates--about twenty strokes a minute I should say; the force-pump's kept it level so far."
"Good," said Dan; "there's nothing else to do but keep it going."
"Nothing," said the chief, and he reeled out of the pitching pilot-house.
Two, three, four hours more--the water had gained nine inches, so the chief reported through the speaking-tube. But still the _Fledgling_ held her tow, and Dan and Mulhatton stood silent at the wheel, the rush of the wind, which had long torn out the double windows, swirling their hair into their eyes and numbing their torn and bleeding hands. The elements, as though divining the weakening of the tug,--a tug which often had laughed them to scorn,--were making mad work of it; there were strange sounds, unforeseen blows--but still the tug hung on.
There came an hour in which she did not rise to the waves as she had been doing,--an hour when the leak gained terribly, and when the _Fledgling_, struggling bravely, if wearily, upward to meet a wave, would stop half-way with a jerk and a sigh, the wave gouging along the deck--breaking over the stern-board.
They could feel her going in the pilot-house. But she hung on to her lines with the grip of death. Dan stood at his mate's side, his eyes fixed straight ahead into the darkness. He had cast his die; he had chosen his lot--now the toll was to be paid. He thought, too, of the men who, without question, had taken their stand with him. He reached out his left hand and placed it gently on his mate's shoulder.
"Good boy, old Mul," he said, in words which, however inadequate, revealed all the heart of his meaning. And Mulhatton simply shifted his feet and gazed ahead, his hard, light eyes as expressionless as marble disks.
The dawn came filtering across the raven waters as the bloodless hand of an old man quivers across a chess-board,--gray dawn, cold dawn, even more merciless than the night, in that it heralded the rise of the sun to smile over the evil wrought in the darker hours. Astern, the white yacht alternately pierced the sky with her bow and sought the depths.
Suddenly a long, triumphant scream of a whistle rang across the dawn--a roll of water parted a retiring wave. The big white yacht moved of her own power. Again the whistle sounded, as though in joy that the vessel had at last found herself. Once more. . . . She mounted the waves in proud defiance. . . . The tow-lines slackened.