“I don’t know much about vessel managin’,” gasped Hiram, “but seein’ that gettin’ ashore was what I was drivin’ at; the thing seems to be progressin’ all favorable.”

Up to this time one passenger on the schooner appeared to be taking calm or tempest with the same equanimity.  This passenger was Imogene, couched at the break of the little poop.  But the cracking report of the bursting sail, and now the dreadful clamor of the imprisoned Cap’n Sproul, stirred her fears.  She raised her trunk and trumpeted with bellowings that shamed the blast.

“Let him up now, ’Delphus!” shouted Hiram, after twirling the wheel vainly and finding that the Dobson heeded it not.  “If there ain’t no sails up he can’t take us out to sea.  Let him up before he gives Imogene hysterics.”

And when Murray released his clutch on the hatch it snapped back, and out over the closed doors of the companionway shot the Cap’n, a whiskered jack-in-the-box, gifted with vociferous speech.

Like the cautious seaman, his first glance was aloft.  Then he spun the useless wheel.

“You whelps of perdition!” he shrieked.  “Lifts cut, mains’l blowed out, and a lee shore a quarter of a mile away!  I’ve knowed fools, lunatics, and idjits, and I don’t want to insult ’em by callin’ you them names.  You—­”

“Well, if we are any crazier for wantin’ to go ashore where we belong than you was for settin’ out to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a night like this, I’d like to have it stated why,” declared Hiram.

“Don’t you know enough to understand that I was tryin’ to save your lives by ratchin’ her off’m this coast?” bellowed Cap’n Sproul.

“Just thought you was crazy, and think so now,” replied the showman, now fully as furious as the Cap’n—­each in his own mind accusing the other of being responsible for their present plight.  “The place for us is on shore, and we’re goin’ there!”

“What do you suppose is goin’ to become of us when she strikes?” bawled the Cap’n, clutching the backstay and leaning into the night.

“She’ll strike shore, won’t she?  Well, that’s what I want to strike.  It’ll sound good and feel good.”

For such gibbering lunacy as this the master mariner had no fit reply.  His jaws worked wordlessly.  He kept his clutch on the backstay with the dizzy notion that this saved him from clutching some one’s throat.

“You’d better begin to pray, you fellers,” he cried at last, with a quaver in his tones.  “We’re goin’ smash-ti-belter onto them rocks, and Davy Jones is settin’ on extra plates for eight at breakfast to-morrer mornin’.  Do your prayin’ now.”

“The only Scripture that occurs to me just now,” said Hiram, in a hush of the gale, “is that ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.’”

That was veritably a Delphic utterance at that moment, had Hiram only known it.

Some one has suggested that there is a providence that watches over children and fools.  It is certain that chance does play strange antics.  Men have fallen from balloons and lived.  Other men have slipped on a banana skin and died.  Men have fought to save themselves from destruction, and have been destroyed.  Other men have resigned themselves and have won out triumphantly.