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The air seemed filled with their flying leaves, any one of which, stem-on could brain a man. Then came the rain, a deluge, a straight, horizontal sheet that poured along like a river, defying gravitation. The black, with Sheldon mounted on him, plunged ahead into the thick of it, stooping far forward and low to the ground to avoid being toppled over backward.
The men, however, bent to their oars with a will, and in about ten minutes, by keeping the boats stem-on to the sea, we forced our way out through the broken water and were enabled to head for the harbour, toward which, wet to the skin, and half-dead with the cold of the piercing bitter wind, we made the best of our way.
Ryan therefore ordered the helm to be shifted, and we were just forging clear, as we thought, and leaving her room to pass under our stern, when a terrific sea swept down upon her, throwing her quarter round, sweeping her from stem to stern, and driving her crew into the rigging, and in an instant there she was, driving along stem-on right for us or, rather, for the spot that we should occupy when she reached it.
The mast and sails of the boat had gone clean over the bows into the water, and would in all probability have been lost to us but for the fact that the shrouds still held; and, this being the case, the boat rode to them as to a sort of floating anchor, keeping her stem-on to the sea.
Meanwhile, the smaller boat, being of lighter draught, continued to come stem-on for the beach. I was covering her, with my rifle nicely resting in a notch of the rock in front of me, and as she came fair end-on I pressed the trigger, and the two foremost oarsmen collapsed on their oars, both of them evidently shot by the one bullet.
She was now about five miles distant, and as she came driving along, now stem-on, with her square canvas full, and anon sweeping round until she presented one or the other of her broadsides to us, with only her fore-and-aft canvas drawing, we were enabled to get a very good view of her.
To attempt such a thing would therefore only be to throw away uselessly the lives of all of us; we must therefore stay where we are, and endure the awful sight as best we can ah, there you have a hint of what will happen if we are not careful! as the boat, lying broadside-on to the sea, rolled heavily and shipped three or four bucketfuls of water `pull, starboard, and get her round stem-on to the sea; and you, O'Toole, get hold of the baler and dish that water out of her.
One of them, indeed, would have lost his life but for Simpson and Maxwell; for the boat was steered alongside stem-on, and the shock of her collision with the brigantine completely upset the balance of the man who was standing in the bows to fend her off, so that he fell overboard between the boat and the brigantine's side.
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