Yet Dorothy felt a sort of joyous excitement in defying the storm, and while she held fast to the railing she peered around through the gloom and thought she saw the dim form of a man clinging to a mast not far away from her.
Dorothy decided she must go to him; so she made a dash forward, during a lull in the storm, to where a big square chicken-coop had been lashed to the deck with ropes.
The terrible sea, the frail boat, the
storms, the suffering, the strangeness and isolation of the situation,--all that should have frightened a robust woman,--seemed to make no impression upon her who had known life only in its most sheltered and consummately artificial aspects, and who was herself all fire and dew and mist, sublimated spirit, all that was soft and tender and clinging in woman.
We worked on; but the water increasing in the hold, it was apparent that the ship would founder; and though the
storm began to abate a little, yet it was not possible she could swim till we might run into any port; so the master continued firing guns for help; and a light ship, who had rid it out just ahead of us, ventured a boat out to help us.
So heavy was the stress of the
storm just at this place that I had the hardest task to win my way up the hill.
The sequel to the strange arrival of the derelict in the storm last night is almost more startling than the thing itself.
He said that in his watch he had been sheltering behind the deckhouse, as there was a rain storm, when he saw a tall, thin man, who was not like any of the crew, come up the companionway, and go along the deck forward and disappear.
with him, by way of diverting her attention from the tumult of the
storm.
The building, which had seemed so small in the tumult of the
storm, now became as square and spacious as usual.
I but came to ask the indulgence of another day since it would be fool-hardy to attempt to navigate a ship in such a
storm.
If he had been a gladsome, unreflecting American opera-audience, he probably would have had his
storm repeated and repeated until he drowned all those people.
The latter spent most of his time out at soak in pale-green snow
storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing aged strangers from villains.
