Van Rensselaer stood clinging to the table, staring; he was repeating the words, half to himself, as if the meaning of them were not yet clear in his clouded brain. "Helpless! adrift! go on the rocks!" And then, suddenly seeing the wild look in the captain's eyes, he sprang at him, screaming: "We don't want to go on the rocks! No; you are mad! Do something! Stop her!" The other saw that he was drunk; but fear was sobering van Rensselaer fast, as excitement had done once before. "Where are we?" he cried. "Where are we?" An awful blow shook the vessel; she reeled and staggered, and the two waited in fright; then, as she righted herself, the captain answered: "We are off the coast of Maine--about fifty miles off. But we are drifting; and we can do nothing at all. If help does not come, we are lost." "Help must come!" screamed van Rensselaer. He understood clearly at last. "You are crazy! It cannot be!" And he started toward the companionway, the captain at his side. As he tried to open the door, however, he stooped, appalled at the wildness of the night. It was black outside; but the wind was a fierce living thing that smote him in the face, and the hissing spray stung like hail. Van Rensselaer stared out only long enough to see a rocket start out from the deck and cleave its way into the sky, and then he reeled back into the cabin. The man was now aware of his situation, and every emotion was gone but terror. He staggered about, flung this way and that with the tossing of the yacht, raising his clenched hands in the air, and screaming in frantic fear: "My God, my God! It can't be! It's a lie! Save us! What shall we do?"--and so on, until the captain turned in sheer disgust and went back to the deck and his duty. But that van Rensselaer did not even know--he raced on back and forth, crazed and raving. All was dead in him now but the wild beast--if, indeed, there had ever been anything else alive in him. He wanted to live--he wanted to get on the land--he was worth a hundred million dollars--he--_he!_ and was he to be drowned like a prisoned rat in a cage? His cries rang above all the storm; he called on God--he wept--he prayed--he cursed; and all the while the mad storm roared on, howling outside like some savage beast that was fighting to get at him, and driving the little vessel on before it to its doom. There was no one to hear him, the prisoned rat in the cage, though he foamed at the mouth in his frenzy. XXXV So an hour or two went by; up above the dawn broke and the daylight came. Van Rensselaer was still howling, though so weak that he could scarcely stagger, when the cabin door was flung wide again, and the captain, white, and with set lips, came in. "It is all over, sir," he said. "We are lost." The owner's eyes were glaring like a maniac's. "What do you mean?" he shrieked.