Nearer lumbered the Quinn.  When within twenty feet of the Kentigern she swung broadside on, ceasing all headway and drifting into position on the tide.

“Now, then,” cried Dan, suddenly leaping into the thwarts and manning the oars.  “Haul on the line.  Bring her right under the Quinn’s stern and then cut, quick!”

Hand over hand hauled Captain Barney and the rowboat came under the stern with a jump.  Then he cut the line.  Dan dug his oars into the water and the slim boat shot for the ladder, while the great tug came down, more slowly, on the side.  Ten, twenty strokes; and then, as Dan with a great sigh unshipped his oars, Captain Barney chuckled, seized the sides of the ladder, and hauling himself on the bottom rung, skipped up with the agility of a monkey.

With a swish and a splash up pounded the Quinn.

“Look out!” roared Dan, “there’s a boat here!”

It saved him; for a bell clanged in the engine-room, and the tug began to make sternway.  It saved him for but a minute, though.

Thoughtless, selfish, and for once an utter fool, the exultant skipper of the Three Sisters sought to gloat over his rival.

“On board the Quinn,” yelled Barney.  “Say, Jim Skelly, this is Barney Hodge talkin’.  You didn’t know he had friends in the rowboat business, did you?”

A curse rang from the Quinn’s pilot-house, and Dan did not wait for anything else.  Well he knew what would happen next, and he bent all his strength to his oars.  He heard the jingle of a bell, and the tug started right for him.

“Look out!” yelled Dan, working the oars like a madman.  But not a word came from the tug, moving silently, inexorably upon him like, some black, implacable monster.

Suddenly Dan cast aside his oars and dived over the side.  The next instant the sharp, copper-bound nose of the tug struck the rowboat fairly amidships, grinding it against the steel side of the freighter, crushing it into matchwood.

A great numbness passed over the man.  He was dazed; and as wave after wave splashed over his head, he struggled dumbly to reach the ladder.  Then under the reaction from the icy shock, an electric thrill of energy and vitality passed through his body.

He saw that he had been carried to about amidships, and the ladder was well toward the bow.  With lusty strokes he struck out along the steel sides, rising over the waves like a duck.  Five minutes elapsed, and then with a sudden fear, Dan realized, in glancing at the bow, that he had not made ten feet in all that time and effort.

It was the current, which was ripping along the hull at the rate that would have affected the speed of a powerful steam launch.  Dan had not noticed it before.  He struggled desperately, but to no avail, and then he uttered his first cry for help.  He could not see the deck, being so close to the hull; and for the same reason he could not have been seen had his cry been heard.  Again he called for assistance, but there was no answer, no sound, save that of the water buffeting past the vessel.