Straight on ahead, where the line of swelling waves burst into breakers, where the spume sang like whip-lashes, and where the whine of the wind tore itself into a nasty snarl, lay the wreck of the schooner Zeitgeist.  She lay half on her side and the waves licked up and over the faded gray hull, completing the work that time already had begun.  One mast was very far forward, the other very far aft—­Great Lake rig; and between the two was a deck-load of thousands of feet of Maine lumber.  The topmasts had snapped off, leaving the stumps.

Lashed in the foremast were two men; and in the mainmast were Captain Ephraim Sayles and three more of his crew.  At first glance they seemed lifeless; at first glance, indeed, they seemed nothing more than faded lengths of canvas.  But an occasional lifting of a hand, a flash of a gray face, showed that they were men and that they still lived and hoped.  Under them, over the deck raced the breakers, waist deep, each one a swift, excited trip-hammer.  It was only the lumber that was holding the aged hull together.  As it was, sections of the sides had ripped out and planks and pieces of deal issuing from the gashes littered the waters.  Three times had the life-savers launched their boats, and three times they had been cast on the beach like logs, while thrice had the lines from their mortars fallen short.

“Go on back; we’ll take care of her.”

And Dan, his teeth bared and coated with blood from anger-bitten lips, gave the wheel to Mulhatton, ran from the pilot-house, and shook his fist at the big wrecking tug.

“Why don’t you take care of her then, curse you!  Why don’t you take care of her?  Don’t you see there are lives to save?  Oh, you cowardly beasts!”

“Nothin’ doin’ till the sea goes down,” came the reply, and Dan sobbed aloud in his rage as he entered the pilot-house, where most of the crew were gathered, peering out of the windows at the tragedy across the waters.

The men in the rigging could be seen plainly now.  There was no excitement.  They kept very still, watching the futile efforts of the life-savers, waving their hands occasionally as though in token of their thanks and their knowledge of the utter futility of human efforts.  No, there was no excitement; the uncertainty that breeds that was lacking.  Fate was simply clamping its damp hand down over those men.  Such things are always quiet—­there is nothing to thrill the heart or stir the soul in them.  It is just a mighty thing dealing death to weaklings, that is all.  And we wonder whether the All-seeing Eye does not sometimes close in sheer pity, to shut out the inequality of it.

While they looked, a venomous wave got under the bow and lifted it high.  Then down it went as a man would crash his palms together, bursting out the forepeak like a rotten apple.  Thus weakened forward, the loss of the foremast was an imminent certainty.  And there were two men in the fore rigging!  Captain Ephraim leaned far out from the mainmast; the tug men could see him plainly as he pointed at the tottering mast and then at the deck.