“Do your anchors hold?” demanded Daggett, who was the first to speak, and who put his question as if he thought his own fate depended on the answer.

“I’m sorry to say they do not.  We drift our length in about two minutes.”

“That will put off the evil moment an hour or two.  Look what a wake we are making!”

Sure enough, that wake was frightful!  No sooner was the head of the Sea Lion, of the Vineyard, fairly up with the stern of the Sea Lion, of Oyster Pond, than Gardiner perceived that she went off diagonally, moving quite as fast to leeward as she went ahead.  This was so very obvious that a line drawn from the quarter of Roswell’s craft, in a quartering direction, would almost have kept the other schooner in its range from the moment that her bow hove heavily past.

“God bless you!—­God bless you!” cried Roswell Gardiner, waving his hand in adieu, firmly persuaded that he and the Vineyard master were never to meet again in this world.  “The survivors must let the fate of the lost be known.  At the pinch, I shall out boats, if I can.”

The other made no answer.  It would have been useless, indeed, to attempt it; since no human voice had power to force itself up against such a gale, the distance that had now to be overcome.

“That schooner will be in the breakers in half an hour,” said Hazard, who stood by the side of young Gardiner.  “Why don’t he anchor!  No power short of Divine Providence can save her.”

“And Divine Providence will do it—­thanks to Almighty God for his goodness!” exclaimed Roswell Gardiner.  “Did you perceive that, Mr. Hazard?”

The ‘that’ of our young mariner was, in truth, a most momentous omen.  The wind had lulled so suddenly that the rags of sails which the other schooner carried actually flapped.  At first our seamen thought she had been becalmed by the swell; but the change about themselves was too obvious to admit of any mistake.  It blew terribly, again, for a minute; then there was another lull.  Gardiner sprang to the lead-line to see the effect on his own vessel.  She no longer dragged her anchor!

“God is with us!” exclaimed the young master—­“blessed for ever be his holy name.”

“And that of his only and true Son,” responded a voice from one at his elbow.

Notwithstanding the emergency, and the excitement produced by this sudden change, Roswell Gardiner turned to see from whom this admonition had come.  The oldest seaman on board, who was Stimson, a Kennebunk man, and who had been placed there to watch the schooner’s drift, had uttered these unusual words.  The fervour with which he spoke produced more impression on the young master than the words themselves; the former being very unusual among sea-faring men, though the language was not so much so.  Subsequently, Gardiner remembered that little incident, which was not without its results.

“I do believe, sir,” cried Hazard, “that the gale is broken.  It often happens, on our own coast, that the south-easters chop round suddenly, and come out nor’-westers.  I hope this will not be too late to save the Vineyard chap, though he slips down upon them breakers at a most fearful rate.”