A hawser now ripped itself clear from out the crest of a roller.  This meant that the two cats, despite the increasing gale and thrash of the onrushing sea had succeeded in paying out a stern line to the men in the yawl, who had slipped it through the snatch block fastened in the buoy.  It meant, too, that this line had been connected with the line they had brought with them from the island, its far end being around the drum of our hoister.

A shrill cry now came from one of the crew in the yawl alongside the spar buoy, followed instantly by the clear, ringing order, “Go ahead!”

Now a burst of feathery steam plumed skyward, and then the slow “chuggity-chug” of our drum cogs rose in the air.  The stern line straightened until it was as rigid as a bar of iron, sagged for an instant under the slump of the staggering sloop, straightened again, and remained rigid.  The sloop, held by the stern line, crept slowly back to safety.

Captain Joe looked over his shoulder, noted the widening distance, and leaped back to the inshore rocks.

Late that afternoon, when the tug, with Captain Joe and me on board, reached the tug’s moorings in New London harbor, the dock was crowded with anxious faces,—­Abram Marrows and his wife among them.  It had been an anxious day along the shore road.  The squall, which had blown for half an hour and had then slunk away toward Little Gull, grumbling as it went, had sent everything that could seek shelter bowling into New London Harbor under close reefs.  It had also started Marrows and his wife on a run to the dock, where they had stood for hours straining their eyes seaward, each incoming vessel, as she swooped past the dock into the inner basin, adding to their anxiety.

“Wouldn’t give a keg o’ sp’ilt fish for her.  Ain’t a livin’ chance o’ savin’ her,” had bellowed the captain of a fishing smack, as he swept by, within biscuit-toss of the dock, his boom submerged, the water curling over the rail.

“She went slap ag’in them chunks o’ cut stone!” shouted the mate of a tug through the window of a pilot house.

“Got her off with her bow split open, but they can’t keep her free!  Sunk by now, I guess,” had yelled one of the crew of a dory making for the shipyard.

As each bulletin was shouted back over the water in answer to the anxious inquiries of Marrows, the wife would clasp her fingers the tighter.  She made no moan or outburst.  Abram would blame her and say it was her fault,—­everything was her fault that went wrong.

When the tug had made fast to a wharf spile Captain Joe cleared the stringpiece, and walked straight to Marrows.  He was still soaking wet underneath his clothes, only his outer garments being dry,—­a condition which never affected him in the least, “salt water bein’ healthy,” he would say.

“What did I tell ye, Abram Marrows?” he exploded, in a voice that could be heard to the turnpike.  “Didn’t I say Baxter warn’t fittin’, and that he ought ter be grubbin’ clams?  Go and dig a hole some’er’s and cover him up head and ears,—­and dig it quick, too, and I’ll lend ye a shovel.”