All these minutes—­seconds, really,—­Captain Joe stood bending forward, watching where the sloop would strike, his hands outstretched in the attitude of a ball-player awaiting a ball.  If her nose should hit the sharp, square edges of one of the ten-ton blocks, God help her!  She would split wide open like a melon.  If by any chance her forefoot should be thrust into one of the many gaps between the enrockment blocks,—­spaces from two to three feet wide,—­and her bow timbers thus take the shock, there was a living chance to save her.

A cry from Baxter, who had dropped the tiller and was scrambling over the stone-covered deck to the bowsprit, reached the captain’s ears, but he never altered his position.  What he was to do must be done surely.  Baxter didn’t count,—­wasn’t in the back of his head.  There were plenty of willing hands to pick up Baxter and his men.

Then a thing happened which, if I had not seen it, I would never have believed possible.  The water cushion of the outsuck helped,—­so did the huge roller which, in its blind rage, had underestimated the distance between its lift and the wide-open jaws of the rock,—­as a maddened bull often underestimates the length of its thrust, its horns falling short of the matador.

Whatever the cause, Captain Joe watched his chance, sprang to the outermost rock, and, bracing his great snubbing posts of legs against its edge, reversed his body, caught the wavering sloop on his broad shoulders, close under her bowsprit chains, and pushed back with all his might.

Then began a struggle between the strength of the man and the lunge of the sea.  With every succeeding onslaught, and before the savage roller could fully lift the staggering craft to hurl her to destruction, Captain Joe, with the help of the outsuck, would shove her back from the waiting rocks.  This was repeated again and again,—­the men in the rescuing yawl meanwhile bending every muscle to carry out the captain’s commands.

Sometimes his head was free enough to shout his orders, and sometimes both man and bow were smothered in suds.

“Keep that fall clear!” would come his order “Stand ready to catch the yawl!  Shut that—­” here a souse would stop his breath,—­“shut that furnace door!  Do ye want the steam out of the b’iler?”—­ etc., etc.

That the slightest misstep on the slimy rocks on which his feet were braced meant sending him under the sloop’s bow where he would be caught between her forefoot and the rocks and ground into pulp concerned him as little as did the fact that Baxter and his men had crawled along the bowsprit over his head and had dropped to the island without wetting their shoes.  That his diving suit was full of water and he soaking wet to the skin, made not the slightest difference to him—­no more than it would to a Newfoundland dog saving a child.  His thoughts were on other things,—­on the rescuing yawl speeding toward the spar buoy, on the stout hands and knowing ones who were pulling for all they were worth to that anchor of safety;—­on two of his own men who, seeing Baxter’s cowardly desertion, had sprung like cats at the bowsprit of the sloop in one of her dives, and were then on the stern ready to pay out a line to the yawl when she reached the goal.  No,—­he’d hold on “till hell froze over.”