“I’ll do my best,” said Bayard with set teeth. He reached over the wheel as the horses started, plunging, and wrung the hand of the drunkard’s wife. He could not trust himself to say more. Such a vision of what life meant to such a woman swept through Angel Alley upon the wings of the gale, that he felt like a man whose eyes have beheld a panorama on a stage in hell. Many people, as the carts rolled through the town, followed on foot, among them a few women whose husbands, or lovers, or brothers were known to be aboard the Clara Em. “Here’s an _old_ woman with a boy aboard! Seems you might find room in one them wagons for her!” cried a young voice. It was the girl known to Windover only by the name of Lena; she for whom the “terrible sea” could have no horrors; the one woman of them from whom no betrothed lover could sail away; to whom no husband should return. “She’s right about that. We must manage somehow!” called Bayard. Strong hands leaned out and swept the old woman up over the wheel, and the horses galloped on. There was neither rain nor snow; but the storm, in the seaman’s sense of the word, was approaching its height. The wind had now become a gale, and blew southeast. The sky was ominously black. To Bayard’s sensitive and excited imagination, as he looked out from the reeling wagon, the mouth of the harbor seemed to gape and grin; the lights of the fleet, furled and anchored for dear life, lost their customary pleasant look, and snapped and shone like teeth in the throat of a monster. The wagons rolled on madly; the horses, lashed to their limit of speed, leaped down Windover Point. They had now left the road, and were dashing across the downs which stretched a mile farther to the eastern shore. The roughness of the route had become appalling, but a Cape horse is as used to boulders as a Cape fisherman; neither wagon overset, though both rolled like foundering ships. The lanterns cut swathes of light in the blackness which bounding wheels and racing heels mowed down before them. Walls of darkness rose ahead, and at its outermost, uttermost margin roared the sea. It seemed to Bayard as if the rescuing party were plunging into eternal mystery. The old woman whose son was aboard the Clara Em crouched at the minister’s feet. Both sat in the dory, which filled the wagon, and which was packed with passengers. The old woman’s bare hands were clenched together, and her lips shut like iron hinges. Bayard wondered at her massive silence. It was something primeval, solemn, outside of his experience. The women of the shore, in stress like hers, would weep, would sob, or shriek. But to the women of the sea this anguish was as old as life itself: to it they were born, and of it they were doomed to die; they bore it as they did the climate of the freezing Cape.