By mid-afternoon a dangerous sea was running.  We should have rounded the boat to, had our situation not been so desperate, and let her drift bow-on to a sea-anchor extemporized of our mast and sail.  Had we broached in those great, over-topping seas, the boat would have been rolled over and over.

Time and again, that afternoon, Arnold Bentham, for our sakes, begged that we come to a sea-anchor.  He knew that we continued to run only in the hope that the decree of the lots might not have to be carried out.  He was a noble man.  So was Captain Nicholl noble, whose frosty eyes had wizened to points of steel.  And in such noble company how could I be less noble?  I thanked God repeatedly, through that long afternoon of peril, for the privilege of having known two such men.  God and the right dwelt in them and no matter what my poor fate might be, I could but feel well recompensed by such companionship.  Like them I did not want to die, yet was unafraid to die.  The quick, early doubt I had had of these two men was long since dissipated.  Hard the school, and hard the men, but they were noble men, God’s own men.

I saw it first.  Arnold Bentham, his own death accepted, and Captain Nicholl, well nigh accepting death, lay rolling like loose-bodied dead men in the boat’s bottom, and I was steering when I saw it.  The boat, foaming and surging with the swiftness of wind in its sail, was uplifted on a crest, when, close before me, I saw the sea-battered islet of rock.  It was not half a mile off.  I cried out, so that the other two, kneeling and reeling and clutching for support, were peering and staring at what I saw.

“Straight for it, Daniel,” Captain Nicholl mumbled command.  “There may be a cove.  There may be a cove.  It is our only chance.”

Once again he spoke, when we were atop that dreadful lee shore with no cove existent.

“Straight for it, Daniel.  If we go clear we are too weak ever to win back against sea and wind.”

He was right.  I obeyed.  He drew his watch and looked, and I asked the time.  It was five o’clock.  He stretched out his hand to Arnold Bentham, who met and shook it weakly; and both gazed at me, in their eyes extending that same hand-clasp.  It was farewell, I knew; for what chance had creatures so feeble as we to win alive over those surf-battered rocks to the higher rocks beyond?

Twenty feet from shore the boat was snatched out of my control.  In a trice it was overturned and I was strangling in the salt.  I never saw my companions again.  By good fortune I was buoyed by the steering-oar I still grasped, and by great good fortune a fling of sea, at the right instant, at the right spot, threw me far up the gentle slope of the one shelving rock on all that terrible shore.  I was not hurt.  I was not bruised.  And with brain reeling from weakness I was able to crawl and scramble farther up beyond the clutching backwash of the sea.