Meantime the people on shore had made fast the hawser to a tree and manned the halyard.  Not a word was uttered by Clara or Thurstane when they parted, for she was speechless with exhaustion and he with anxiety and terror.  The moment he let go of her he had to grip a loop of top-hamper and hold on with all his might to save himself from being pitched into the water by a fresh jerk of the mast and a fresh inundation of flying surge.  When he could look at her again she was far out on the hawser, rising and falling in quick, violent, perilous swings, caught at by the toppling breakers and howled at by the undertow.  Another deluge blinded him; as soon as he could he gazed shoreward again, and shrieked with joy; she was being carefully lifted from the sling; she was saved—­if she was not dead.

When the apparatus was hauled back to the top the captain said to Thurstane, “Your turn now.”

The young man hesitated, glanced around for Coronado and Garcia, and replied, “Those first.”

It was not merely humanity, and not at all good-will toward these two men, which held him back from saving his life first; it was mainly that motto of nobility, that phrase which has such a mighty influence in the army, “An officer and a gentleman.”  He believed that he would disgrace his profession and himself if he should quit the wreck while any civilian remained upon it.

Coronado, leaving his uncle to the care of a sailor, had already climbed the shrouds, and was now crawling through the lubber hole into the top.  For once his hardihood was beaten; he was pale, tremulous and obviously in extreme terror; he clutched at the sling the moment he was pointed to it.  With the utmost care, and without even a look of reproach, Thurstane helped secure him in the loops and launched him on his journey.  Next came the turn of Garcia.  The old man seemed already dead.  He was livid, his lips blue, his hands helpless, his voice gone, his eyes glazed and set.  It was necessary to knot him into the sling as tightly as if he were a corpse; and when he reached shore it could be seen that he was borne off like a dead weight.

“Now then,” said the captain to Thurstane.  “We can’t go till you do.  Passengers first.”

Exhausted by his drenchings, and by a kind of labor to which he was not accustomed, the lieutenant obeyed this order, took his place in the sling, nodded good-by to the brave sailors, and was hurled out of the top by a plunge of surf, as a criminal is pushed from the cart by the hangman.

No idea has been given, and no complete idea can be given, of the difficulties, sufferings, and perils of this transit shoreward.  Owing to the rising and falling of the mast, the hawser now tautened with a jerk which flung the voyager up against it or even over it, and now drooped in a large bight which let him down into the seethe of water and foam that had just rushed over the vessel, forcing it down on its