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The swarming men, stooping and raising up, the uplifted arms, the flying stones, the spurting water covering the boats with foam; and in the midst of the confusion the polder-jungens flinging the clods of earth with giant strength and swiftness upon the raft.
Then something went wrong with the rope and the raft gradually sank, the men swimming ashore. On examination it was found that, not only were the leaking casks gone, but the rope that tied them together. The situation now appeared more hopeless than before. It was Lisle who suggested a possible way out of the difficulty.
Occasionally sea-birds flew overhead, and huge fish were seen swimming by, or breaking the calm surface as they poked up their noses or leaped into the air. "Oh, Dick, Dick, what dat?" suddenly exclaimed Charley. As he spoke, a dozen flying-fish, their wings glittering in the bright sun, leaped on to the raft, some tumbling into the child's basket.
I deemed it so. I set about cutting some leafy branches that grew near, and trying them along the gunwales of my little craft. In less than half an hour, I pushed her from the shore; and no one at a distance would have taken her for aught else than a floating raft of brushwood.
Our "salt tute" had gone through many a storm at sea; had once escaped, the only soul saved out of fifty-three, from a foundered bark, and endured five days' suffering, without bread or water, on a raft. But, as I heard him tell Mr Clare afterwards, he had never undergone an experience more painful than those two or three hours of gale in our little cutter.
But the horror increased one lashing having given way, all the rest soon followed; and, before the boats could turn and give assistance the sea was strewed with the spars which composed the raft, with men, women, and children clinging to them. Loud were the yells of despair, and the shrieks of the women, as they embraced their offspring, and in attempting to save them were lost themselves.
"It will insure us a crop, and bread and seed-corn for many years," he said; he also highly valued the tomahawk, as his axe was worn and blunt. Louis was divided between the iron pot and the canoe. Hector seemed to think the raft, after all, might have formed a substitute for the latter; besides, Indiana had signified her intention of helping him to make a canoe.
Then at once, as if some hope had sprung up within him at seeing them continue to fly over the raft, and so near as almost to touch the tarpaulin, he added, starting to his feet as he spoke "What if I might knock one o' 'em down! Where's the handspike?"
The carpenter and his mates tried to repair the damage, but, tossed from wave to wave, the raft was inclined to an angle of more than forty-five degrees, making it impossible for them to keep their footing, and rolling one over another, they were thrown down by the violent shocks. Why they were not altogether carried away, why we were not all hurled into the sea, was to me a mystery.
Not only the plank, but the whole raft moved under this inexplicable impulsion, which had communicated to it a rocking motion, not from side to side, but upwards and downwards! So quick and violent was this mysterious oscillation, that it was with difficulty the three individuals who still occupied the decks of the craft could keep either their balance or their feet.
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