“Hoist away on your forward tackle,” ordered the Captain.  “Belay!  Make fast!  Now get a hold of this guy.  Lively there, you men.  Noble, aloft on the booms and shoulder her over.”

She canted clear of the groove in the chocks as they swung the forward davit out and the Captain stepped abaft the men who hauled.

“Lively now,” he called.  “Don’t keep those chaps waiting, men.  After davit tackle, haul!  Up with her.”

The bo’sun, stooping, looped the fall of the tackle into the snatch-block; the men, under the Captain’s eye, tumbled to and gave way, holding the weight gallantly as the rail swung down and putting their backs into the pull as she rolled back.

“Up with her!” shouted the Captain, and she tore loose from her bed.  “Vast hauling!  Belay!  Now out with the davit, men.”

He stepped a pace forward as they passed out the line.  “Haul away,” he was saying, when the bo’sun shouted hoarsely and tried to reach him with a dash across the slippery deck planks.  The mate screamed, the Captain humped his shoulders for the blow.  It all happened in a flash of disaster; the boat’s weight pulled the pin from the cheeks of the block and down she came, her stern thudding thickly into the deck, while the Captain, limp and senseless, rolled inertly to the scuppers.

When he came to he was in his bunk.  He opened his eyes with a shiver upon the familiar cabin, with its atmosphere of compact neatness, its gleaming paint and bright-work.  A throb of brutal pain in his head wrung a grunt from him, and then he realized that something was wrong with his right arm.  He tried to move it, to bring it above the bedclothes to look at it, and the effort surprised an oath from him, and left him dizzy and shaking.  The white jacket of the steward came through a mist that was about him.

“Better, I hope, sir?” the steward was saying.  “Beggin’ your pardon, but you’d better lie still, sir.  Is there anything I could bring you, sir?”

“Did the boat fall on me?” asked the Captain, carefully.  His voice seemed thin to himself.

“Not on you, sir,” replied the steward.  “Not so to speak, on top of you.  The keel ‘it you on the shoulder, sir, an’ you contracted a thump on the ’ead.”

“And the wreck?” asked the Captain.

“The wreck’s crew is aboard, sir; barque Vavasour, of London, sir.  The mate brought ’em off most gallantly, sir.  I was to tell ’im when you come to, sir.”

“Tell him, then,” said the Captain, and closed his eyes wearily.  The pain in his head blurred his thoughts, but his lifelong habit of waking from sleep to full consciousness, with no twilight of muddled faculties intervening, held good yet.  He remembered, now, the new pins in the blocks, and there was even a tincture of amusement in his reflections.  A soft tread beside him made him open his eyes.

“Well, Arthur,” he said.

The tall young mate was beside him.