Part 18 (2/2)

”Hullo!” cried the captain, at last.

”Why didn't you come in the cutter?”

The captain crossed his arms and leaned over the stern.

”Don't you know that Hiram Hudson is always the last to leave a sinking s.h.i.+p?”

”Well, you _are_ the last,” said Wylie. ”So now come on board the long-boat at once. I dare not tow in her wake much longer, to be sucked in when she goes down.”

”Come on board your craft and desert my own?” said Hudson, disdainfully.

”Know my duty to m' employers better.”

These words alarmed the mate. ”Curse it all!” he cried; ”the fool has been and got some more rum. Fifty guineas to the man that will s.h.i.+n up the tow-rope and throw that madman into the sea; then we can pick him up.

He swims like a cork.”

A sailor instantly darted forward to the rope. But, unfortunately, Hudson heard this proposal, and it enraged him. He got to his cutla.s.s. The sailor drew the boat under the s.h.i.+p's stern, but the drunken skipper flourished his cutla.s.s furiously over his head. ”Board me! ye pirates!

the first that lays a finger on my bulwarks, off goes his hand at the wrist.” Suiting the action to the word, he hacked at the tow-rope so vigorously that it gave way, and the boats fell astern.

Helen Rolleston uttered a shriek of dismay and pity. ”Oh, save him!” she cried.

”Make sail!” cried Cooper; and, in a few seconds, they got all her canvas set upon the cutter.

It seemed a hopeless chase for these sh.e.l.ls to sail after that dying monster with her cloud of canvas all drawing, alow and aloft.

But it did not prove so. The gentle breeze was an advantage to light craft, and the dying _Proserpine_ was full of water, and could only crawl.

After a few moments of great anxiety the boats crept up, the cutter on her port and the long-boat on her starboard quarter.

Wylie ran forward, and, hailing Hudson, implored him, in the friendliest tones, to give himself a chance. Then tried him by his vanity, ”Come, and command the boats, old fellow. How can we navigate them on the Pacific without _you?”_

Hudson was now leaning over the taffrail utterly drunk. He made no reply to the mate, but merely waved his cutla.s.s feebly in one hand, and his bottle in the other, and gurgled out, ”Duty to m' employers.”

Then Cooper, without a word, double reefed the cutter's mainsail and told Welch to keep as close to the s.h.i.+p's quarter as he dare. Wylie instinctively did the same, and the three craft crawled on in solemn and deadly silence, for nearly twenty minutes.

The wounded s.h.i.+p seemed to receive a death-blow. She stopped dead, and shook.

The next moment she pitched gently forward, and her bows went under the water, while her after-part rose into the air, and revealed to those in the cutter two splintered holes in her run, just below the water-line.

The next moment her stern settled down; the sea yawned horribly, the great waves of her own making rushed over her upper deck, and the lofty masts and sails, remaining erect, went down with sad majesty into the deep. And nothing remained but the bubbling and foaming of the voracious water, that had swallowed up the good s.h.i.+p, and her cargo, and her drunken master.

All stood up in the boats, ready to save him. But either his cutla.s.s sunk him, or the suction of so great a body drew him down. He was seen no more in this world.

A loud sigh broke from every living bosom that witnessed that terrible catastrophe.

<script>