“We beached her by hand, and already the wheelwright had a wrench and was unscrewing the nuts of the broken shaft. We carried four men to the boathouse, two of them with their hands on their chests where the broken oars had caught them. Eh? Oh yes, they’d jackets on.... We tried again, waiting till the breaker had spread away roaring in the darkness, and she rose again. She seemed to hang for a dreadful long time between the two crests of curling white that rushed together to meet her,--the wave was a slanting wall all laced over with a pattern of grey foam,--and then she disappeared. But she was on the wrong side still, and her rudder was smashed. A man struck at me as I dragged him out of the water: it was John Broadwood. I’d got hold of his right wrist, and it dangled when I let it go; so I took him by the other arm. We headed the horses round to try again, edging close under the shelter of the jetty and the plunging cobles; and that time I turned my face away as she lifted--she was so frightfully near the jetty. But when I looked again, there she was. She’d neither ridden it nor got through it; and the Spit, booming a mile away, seemed to mock us that we couldn’t get through the breakers. “We all gathered in the boathouse again--farmers, fishermen, injured men, gipsies. Osa Couper was talking to old Joe Barker, and a fellow who was listening turned suddenly away and pulled out his pipe. That cut us--cut those who saw him: it seemed all there was to do--to light your pipe. And then we heard women’s voices again: Lizzie and the gipsy woman were among us. What were we waiting for? they asked; and the man who was lighting his pipe nodded at the injured men. Lizzie’s bosom lifted, and she began to talk again. She talked as she had talked before in the ‘Dotterel’.... “The boat was high on the beach, and they’d taken the horses out; they put them in again and made a fourth attempt--a fifth--a sixth. After the sixth we went back to the boathouse; another man had given it up now, and had taken up an old lobster-pot and was setting the broken ends straight. Useful occupation.... “I told you--did I tell you?--about old Joe Barker. He had turned sixty then. He’d a wrinkled, nut-cracker face, and his mouth and chin chopped up and down together when he spoke, like one of these talking dolls; he’d deep furrows from the corners of his mouth, just like one of these ventriloquist’s dolls. He was chopping and chewing now to Osa Couper; and all at once he cried out, ‘Have ye done all ye can, ye fishermen?’ They scowled at him.