the line passed close to the mainmast and a stiffened arm reached out and caught it, drew it inboard at the maintop, some thirty feet or so above the wave-washed[280] deck. there followed an interval of minutes—they did not seem like hours but they seemed tragically long—in which the two or three men gathered in the maintop, which is a small semi-circular platform with barely standing room for three, made various movements making fast the line; and having guarded against losing it they began slowly to pull its length in toward them.

the light line for firing carried to them a stouter rope, bent to the end of it, and a block and tackle. eventually the block reached them and the people on shore prepared for the running out of the breeches buoy.

and all this dark and sightless while the distress of the motionless figures lashed in the mizzen rigging was something palpable, acute, and sensed without the need of a single gesture, a single sign, a moment’s glimpse. how were these unfortunates to avail themselves of the breeches buoy even when it reached the ship? to get to it they would have to unlash themselves, descend, and cross the deck between the mizzenmast and the mainmast and ascend to the maintop. to cross the deck would be impossible. as well try to walk fifty feet on the surface of the atlantic.

it was not certain, furthermore, that those in the mizzen retained any power of physical movement. they did not shift their positions. although they had lashed themselves in pairs close together they did not strike each other about the head, shoulders, and body,[281] as they should be doing if they had any vigour left, in the imperative effort to keep from freezing.

slowly, with a painful slowness, the line was got ready for the running of the breeches buoy. and then it was that keeper tom lupton manifested his intention of being hauled out in the buoy to the vessel.

there was emphatic dissent. the men pleaded with him in shouts, shrieking arguments that the wind tore from their lips and the great thunder of the ocean drowned. these were not circumstances under which he should feel impelled to go aboard; the risk of travel either way was too serious for a single unnecessary journey in the buoy to be undertaken; the line might not have been made fast properly, in which event he would be the first man lost; in the conditions that existed he could do nothing when he got aboard, and he would become merely one more man to be hauled ashore.

these pleas were without avail. keeper tom admitted that he “didn’t know what he could do till he got there. the thing,” he added, “is to get there.”

“dick,” he shouted in richard hand’s ear, “in any case, i can’t do much alone. i can’t ask any of my men to risk their lives by coming out on the next trip out of the buoy. i’m not asking you to. but men——”

the racket of the storm made the end of the sentence inaudible. dick hand did not need it. he flung his[282] arm about tom lupton and bellowed: “i’ll be there. next trip out.”

keeper tom communicated the order to his men. it was not until tom lupton was in the buoy and moving over the boiling surf at the foot of the sand dunes that richard hand thought, with a shock, of mary vanton. three men in the world were charged, in varying degrees, with some responsibility to stand by her and aid her. one had disappeared and the other two were about to jeopard their lives.