Thrackles followed him, but no one else moved.  In an instant the two were back, striking and kicking savagely, rousing their companions to the danger.  We all laid into the canvas like mad, and in no time had snugged down to a staysail and the peak of our mainsail.  Thrackles drew his knife and jumped for the cable, while Handy Solomon, his eyes snapping, seized the wheel.

We finished just in time.  I was turning away after tying the last gasket on the foresail, when the deck up-ended and tipped me headforemost into the starboard scupper.  At the same time a smother of salt water blew over the port rail, now far above me, to drench me as thoroughly as though I had fallen overboard.  I brushed out my eyes to find the ship smack on her beam ends, and the wind howling by from the sea.

I had company enough in the scuppers.  Only Handy Solomon clung desperately to the wheel, jamming his weight to port in the hope she might pay up:  Thrackles, too, his eye squinted along some bearing of his own, was waiting for her to drag.  Presently it became evident that she was doing so, whereupon he drew his knife across our hawser.

“My God,” chattered Pulz at my ear.  “If we go ashore—­”

He did not need to finish.  Unless the Laughing Lass could recover before the squall had driven her to leeward a scant half mile, we should be cooked alive in the boiling cauldron at the shore’s edge.

For an interminable time, as it seemed to me, we lay absolutely motionless.  The scene is stamped indelibly on my memory—­the bulwarks high above me, the steep, sleek deck, the piratical figure tense at the wheel, the snarling water racing from beneath us, the lurid glow to landward crawling up on us inch by inch like a hungry wild beast.  Then almost imperceptibly the brave schooner righted.  The strained lines on Handy Solomon’s carven features relaxed little by little.  Thrackles, staring over the side, let out a mighty roar.

“Steerage way,” he shouted, and executed an awkward clog dance on the reeling deck.

She moved forward, there was no doubt of that, for gradually we were eating toward the wind—­but we made considerable leeway as well.  Handy Solomon, taut as the weather rigging, took his little advantages one by one like precious gifts.  Light there was none; the land was blotted out by the steam and murk which had crept to sea and now was hurled back by the wind.  All we could do was to hang there, tasting the copper of excitement, waiting for these different forces to adjust themselves.  Inch by inch we crept forward:  foot by foot we made leeway.  The intensest of the lava glow worked its way from directly abeam to the quarter.  By this we knew we must be nearly opposite the cove.  At once a new doubt sprang up in our minds.