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Yes, as one of the Irish guests remarked, `It was a great occasion intoirely, and it will be long before the event is forgotten, for the noble deeds of our Greyton lifeboat are, from this day forward, intimately and inseparably connected with her coxswain's wedding!"
A few minutes more and the familiar blue and white boat of mercy leaped out of darkness into the midst of the foaming waters like a living creature. It was the boat from the neighbouring port of Brentley. Either the storm-drift had not been so thick in that direction as in the neighbourhood of Greyton, or the Brentley men had kept a better look-out. She had run down to the wreck under sail.
"An' you say that you've nothin' to keep you here! What's this?" said Slag, laying his strong hand tenderly on the blue side of the boat. "Well, I'll be sorry to leave her, of course, an all my friends in Greyton, but friends will get along well enough without me, an' as for the boat, she'll never want a good coxswain while Joe Slag's alive an' well."
Thus spake the Greyton oracle; but, prophet though that journal professed to be, the oracle failed to discern that from that time forward the names of Robert Massey and Joe Slag would very soon cease to be connected with the Greyton lifeboat.
She was the coxswain's bride-elect, and up to that date the course of their true love had run quite smoothly in spite of adverse proverbs. "I can't believe my luck," said Bob, gravely. He said most things gravely, though there was not a man in Greyton who could laugh more heartily than he at a good joke.
When the lifeboat escaped from the turmoil of cross-seas that raged over the sands and got into deep water, all difficulties and dangers were past, and she was able to lay her course for Greyton harbour. "Let's have another swig o' that cold tea," said Bob Massey, resuming his rightful post at the helm. "It has done me a power o' good.
At last they got out so far that they could hoist sail and run with a slant for the wreck. It was daylight by the time the Greyton lifeboat arrived at the scene of action, but the thick, spray-charged atmosphere was almost as bad to see through as the blackness of night.
On the pier-head at Greyton their signals had indeed been observed, but while the Brentley boat, owing to its position, could run down to the wreck with all sail set, it was impossible for that of Greyton to reach it, except by pulling slowly against wind and tide. The instant that Bob Massey saw the flare of the first tar-barrel he had called out his men.
As if to accommodate him, and confirm the crew in the whistling superstition, the breeze did increase at the moment, and sent the lifeboat, as one of the men said, "snorin'" over the wild sea towards the harbour of Greyton. It was a grand sight to behold the pier of the little port on that stormy morning. Of course, it had soon become known that the lifeboat was out.
Robert Massey, though quite young, was already a leader of men not only by nature but by profession being coxswain of the Greyton lifeboat, and, truly, the men who followed his lead had need to be made of good stuff, with bold, enthusiastic, self-sacrificing spirits, for he often led them into scenes of wild but, hold! We must not forecast.
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