Deep, dull, booming, ominous, the roar continued. The sail flapped idle on the mast. Stern could distinguish a long line of foam that slid away, past the boat, as only foam slides on a swift current.
He peered, in the gloom, to port; and all at once, far on the horizon, saw a thing that stopped his heart a moment, then thrashed it into furious activity.
Off there in a direction he judged as almost due northeast, a tenuous, rising veil of vapor blotted out the lesser stars and dimmed the brighter ones.
Even in that imperfect light he could see something of the sinuous drift of that strange cloud.
Quickly he lashed the tiller, crept forward and climbed the mast, his night-glasses slung over his shoulder.
Holding by one hand, he tried to concentrate his vision through the glasses, but they failed to show him even as much as the naked eye could discern.
The sight was paralyzing in its omen of destruction. Only too well Stern realized the meaning of the swift, strong current, the roar—now ever increasing, ever deepening in volume—the high and shifting vapor veil that climbed toward the dim zenith.
“Merciful Heaven!” gulped he. “There’s a cataract over there—a terrible chasm—a plunge—to what? And we’re drifting toward it at express-train speed!”
CHAPTER XI. THE PLUNGE!
DAZED though Stern was at his first realization of the impending horror, yet through his fear for Beatrice, still asleep among her furs, struggled a vast wonder at the meaning, the possibility of such a phenomenon.
How could a current like that rush up along the Sound? How could there be a cataract, sucking down the waters of the sea itself—whither could it fall? Even at that crisis the man’s scientific curiosity was aroused; he felt, subconsciously, the interest of the trained observer there in the midst of deadly peril.
But the moment demanded action.
Quickly Stern dropped to the deck, and, noiseless as a cat in his doe-skin sandals, ran aft.
But even before he had executed the instinctive tactic of shifting the helm, paying off, and trying to beat up into the faint breeze that now drifted over the swirling current, he realized its futility and abandoned it.
“No use,” thought he. “About as effective as trying to dip up the ocean with a spoon. Any use to try the sweeps? Maybe she and I together could swing away out of the current—make the shore—nothing else to do—I’ll try it, anyhow.”
Beside the girl he knelt.
“Beta! Beta!” he whispered in her ear. He shook her gently by the arm. “Come, wake up, girlie—there’s work to do here!”
She, submerged in healthy sleep, sighed deeply and murmured some unintelligible thing; but Stern persisted. And in a minute or so there she was, sitting up in the bottom of the yawl among the furs.
In the dim moonlight her face seemed a vague sweet flower shadowed by the dark, wind-blown masses of her hair. Stern felt the warmth, scented the perfume of her firm, full-blooded flesh. She put a hand to her hair; her tiger-skin robe, falling back to the shoulder, revealed her white and beautiful arm.
All at once she drew that arm about the man and brought him close to her breast.
“Oh, Allan!” she breathed. “My boy! Where are we? What is it? Oh, I was sleeping so soundly! Have we reached harbor yet? What’s that noise—that roaring sound? Surf?”
For a moment he could not answer. She, sensing some trouble, peered closely at him.
“What is it, Allan?” cried she, her woman’s intuition telling her of trouble. “Tell me—is anything wrong?”
“Listen, dearest!”
“Yes, what?”
“We’re in some kind of—of—”
“What? Danger?”
“Well, it may be. I don’t know yet. But there’s something wrong. You see—”
“Oh, Allan!” she exclaimed, and started up. “Why didn’t you waken me before? What is it? What can I do to help?”
“I think there’s rough water ahead, dear,” the engineer answered, trying to steady his voice, which shook a trifle in spite of him; “At any rate, it sounds like a waterfall of some kind or other; and see, there’s a line, a drift of vapor rising over there. We’re being carried toward it on a strong current.”
Anxiously she peered, now full awake. Then she turned to Allan.
“Can’t we sail away?”
“Not enough wind. We might possibly row out of the current, and—and perhaps—”
“Give me one of the sweeps quick, quick!”
He put the sweeps out. No sooner had he braced himself against a rib of the yawl and thrown his muscles against the heavy bar than she, too, was pulling hard.
“Not too strong at first, dear,” he cautioned. “Don’t use up all your strength in the first few minutes. We may have a long fight for it!”
“I’m in it with you—till the end—whichever way it ends,” she answered; and in the moonlight he saw the untrammeled swing and play of her magnificent body.
The yawl came round slowly till it was crosswise to the current, headed toward the mainland shore. Now it began to make a little headway. But the breeze slightly impeded it.
Stern whipped out his knife and slashed the sheets of platted rush. The sail crumpled, crackled and slid down; and now under a bare pole the boat cradled slowly ahead transversely across the foam-streaked current that ran swiftly soughing toward the dim vapor-swirls away to the northeast.
No word was spoken now. Both Beatrice and Stern lay to the sweeps; both braced themselves and put the full force of back and arms into each long, powerful stroke. Yet Stern could see that, at the rate of progress they were making over that black and oily swirl, they could not gain ten feet while the current was carrying them a thousand.
In his heart he knew the futility of the fight, yet still he fought. Still Beatrice fought for life, too, there by his side. Human instinct, the will to live, drove them on, on, where both understood there was no hope.
For now already the current had quickened still more. The breeze had sprung up from the opposite direction; Stern knew the boiling rush of waters had already reached a speed greater than that of the wind itself. No longer the stars trembled, reflected? in the waters. All ugly, frothing, broken, the swift current foamed and leaped, in long, horrible gulfs and crests of sickening velocity.
And whirlpools now began to form. The yawl was twisted like a straw, wrenched, hurled, flung about with sickening violence.
“Row! Row!” Stern cried none the less. And his muscles bunched and hardened with the labor; his veins stood out, and sweat dropped from his brow, ran into his eyes, and all but blinded him.
The girl, too, was laboring with all her might. Stern heard her breath, gasping and quick, above the roar and swash of the mad waters. And all at once revulsion seized him—rage, and a kind of mad exultation, a defiance of it all.
He dropped the sweep and sprang to her.
“Beta!” he shouted, louder than the droning tumult. “No use! No use at all! Here—come to me!”
He drew the sweep inboard and flung it in the bottom of the yawl.
Already the vapors of the cataract ahead were drifting over them and driving in their faces. A vibrant booming shuddered through the dark air, where now even the moon’s faint light was all extinguished by the whirling mists.
Heaven and sea shook with the terrible concussion of falling waters. Though Stern had shouted, yet the girl could not have heard him now.
In the gloom he peered at her; he took her in his arms. Her face was pale, but very calm. She showed no more fear than the man; each seemed inspired with some strange exultant thought of death, there with the
