BY WILLIAM O. STODDARD.

CHAPTER XX.

Dismally barren and lonesome was that desolate bar between the “bay” and the ocean.  Here and there it swelled up into great drifts and mounds of sand, which were almost large enough to be called hills; but nowhere did it show a tree or a bush, or even a patch of grass.  Annie Foster found herself getting melancholy as she gazed upon it and thought of how the winds must sometimes sweep across it, laden with sea-spray and rain and hail, or the bitter sleet and blinding snow of winter.

“Dabney,” she said, “was the storm very severe here last night and yesterday?”

“Worse here than over our side of the bay, ten times.”

“Were there any vessels wrecked?”

“Most likely; but it’s too soon to know just where.”

At that moment the “Swallow” was running rapidly around a sandy point, jutting into the bay from the highest mound on the bar, not half a mile from the light-house, and only twice as far from the low, wooden roof of the “wrecking station,” where, as Dab had explained to his guests, the life-boats and other apparatus were kept safely housed.  The piles of drifted sand had for some time prevented the brightest eyes on board the “Swallow” from seeing anything to seaward; but now, as they came around the point and a broad level lay before them, Ham Morris sprang to his feet in sudden excitement as he exclaimed: 

“In the breakers!  Why, she must have been a three-master.  All up with her now.”

“Look along the shore!” shouted Dab.  “Some of ’em saved, anyhow.  The coast-men are there, life-boats and all.”

So they were, and Ham was right about the vessel, though not a mast was left standing in her now.  If there had been, indeed, she might have been kept off the breakers, as they afterward learned.  She had been dismasted in the storm, but had not struck until after daylight that morning, and help had been close at hand and promptly given.  No such thing as saving that unfortunate hull.  She would beat to pieces just where she lay, sooner or later, according to the kind of weather and the waves it should bring with it.

The work done by the life-boat men had been a good one, and had not been very easy either, for they had brought the crew and passengers from the wreck safely to the sandy beach.  They had even saved some items of baggage.  In a few hours, the “coast wrecking tugs” would be on hand to look out for the cargo.  No chance whatever for the ’longshoremen, good or bad, to turn an honest penny without working hard for it.  Work and wages enough, to be sure, helping to unload, when the sea, now so very heavy, should go down a little; but “wages” were not what some of them were most hungry for.

Two of them, at all events—­one a tall, weather-beaten, stoop-shouldered, grizzled old man, in tattered raiment, and the other, even more battered, but with no “look of the sea” about him—­stood on a sand-drift gloomily gazing at the group of shipwrecked people on the shore, and the helpless mass of timber and spars out there among the beatings of the surf.