148 THE BOY CAPTAIN.

nothing to avoid what appeared almost certain destruction,
and the watchers from the brig saw that each man was
standing like a statue, awaiting the fate which was evi-
dently about to overtake him.

The time of suspense was short.

Before the brig’s boats could be lowered, although the
first officer gave the command as soon as he received it
from the captain, the column of water struck the schooner
well forward, apparently burying her beneath the waves,
and, bursting into a flood of spray, hid all that section. of
the sea from view of the spectators.

«She’s gone!” Ben exclaimed, and Miss Dunham
clasped her hands in an agony of apprehension.

The words had hardly been spoken before the schooner
bounded upward as if she were a living thing struggling
to escape the clutches of some marine monster, and it
seemed as if she literally shook herself to throw off the
weight of water; but she was no longer the trim, jaunty
craft of a few seconds previous.

She rolled and tumbled in the boiling sea, herself the
centre of a circle half a mile in diameter, wherein the
water foamed and tossed as in a whirlpool, with the fore-
mast snapped off close to the deck, its gear bringing
down in the fall the main-topmast, and carrying away the
jib-boom.

The raffle of spars and rigging alongside were being
thrown against the hull with such force that the resound-
ing blows could be heard distinctly on board the brig, and
the schooner’s crew were seen frantically endeavouring to