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We got between them and the shore; and then a rope was made ready, one of the men stood up and dexterously threw it right over a pirate's head, snatched it tightly to him, dragged him from his hold, and he was at last drawn to the side half-drowned, hauled aboard, and his hands and feet tied.
One had only to note the wild rush of the surges, their height, and the fierceness with which they broke as they swept down upon our own ship, and the headlong reeling and plunging of her as she met their assault, to realise the absolute impossibility of lowering a boat from her without involving the frail craft and her crew in instant destruction; and how otherwise were those poor, half-drowned wretches to be got at and saved.
Soon crash! bang, a rail gave way, sending the dignified governor, stove-pipe hat flying in the air, coat-tails covering his head, into a ditch, his long legs kicking frantically to extricate his head from the mud. We rescued him and staff with difficulty from the filth, looking like a bedraggled pack of half-drowned rats.
Trimm peered down at him he saw a red stain spreading on the rock under the still, silent figure's head. Mr. Trimm turned to the washboiler. It lay on its side, empty, the last of its recent contents sputtering out into the half-drowned fire. He stared at this ruin a minute. Then without another look over the cliff edge he stumbled slowly down the hill, muttering to himself as he went.
But the Star remained. And Captain Abraham Smith, with a long, good rope about his waist, dashed again and again into that awful surging to snatch victims from death, clutching at passing hands, heads, garments, in the cataract-sweep of the seas, saving, aiding, cheering, though blinded by spray and battered by drifting wreck, until his strength failed in the unequal struggle at last, and his men drew him aboard senseless, with some beautiful half-drowned girl safe in his arms.
Gloria was, like myself, cast up from the sea. I found her half-drowned, a helpless infant tied to a floating spar. It was on the other side of these Islands among the rocks where there is no landing-place. There is a little church on the heights up there, and every evening the men and boys practise their sacred singing.
And the tribe, dropping down from the branches, quite cheerfully resumed its march. On the fifth day of the march they saw the jungle on their right come to an end. It was succeeded by a vast expanse of shallow mere dotted with half-drowned, rushy islets, and swarming with crocodiles. After some hesitation, Grôm decided to go on, though he was uneasy about forsaking the refuge of the trees.
I did not want to send the present by anybody, for that seemed to me like entering into explanations why I sent the money; and I knew that if the news reached my mother's ears that I had been half-drowned, it would come upon her like a terrible shock; and she was, I knew now, too ill to bear anything more.
"'If he ain't found, she sobbed, 'I'm done for, I am; 'e's my hall. "There was something horribly genuine in the sound of this cry. I began to see beyond the gin in which this poor woman was soaked; I began to see her half-drowned soul that yet had life, had breath. "'We'll find him, I said. "'Never, never, she wailed, rocking her thin body to and fro, 'I know 'e's gone to sea, 'e 'as.
'Thanks awfully, said Ken and Roy in one breath, and hurried off at once. The cook, a lean, solemn-faced man named Lemuel Gill, showed no surprise whatever at the sudden apparition of two half-drowned strangers.
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