“That’s too bad, Mr. Sanford, but we can’t help it,” said Captain Joe in his customary voice, paying no more attention to Carleton’s talk than if it had been the slop of the waves at his feet. “All hands, now, on these derricks. We got’er git ’em up, boys, if it takes all night.” Again the men sprang to his orders, and again and again the crescendos of oaths culminated in fortissimos of profanity as the risks for the men increased. For five consecutive hours they worked without a pause. Slowly and surely the whole system, beginning with the two side derricks, whose guys still held their anchorage, was raised upright, Sanford still watching the opposite derrick, a new outward guy having replaced the broken one. It was six o’clock when the four derricks were again fairly erect. The same gang was tugging at the watch-tackle, and the distance between the hook and the ring was once more reduced to five feet. The hook gained inch by inch towards its anchorage. Captain Joe’s eyes gleamed with suppressed satisfaction. All this time the tide had been rising. Most of the rough, above-water rocks were submerged, and fully three feet of water washed over the concrete disk. Only the tops of the rough stones where Sanford stood, and the platform where Carleton sat, out of all danger from derricks or sea, were clear of the incoming wash. Meanwhile the Screamer’s life-boat—the only means the men had that day of leaving the Ledge and boarding the sloop, moored in the lee of the Ledge—had broken from her moorings, and lay dangerously near the rocks. The wind too had changed to the east. With it came a long, rolling swell that broke on the eastern derrick,—the fourth one, the key-note of the system, the one Captain Joe and the men were tightening up. Suddenly a window was opened somewhere in the heavens, and a blast of wet air heaped the sea into white caps, and sent it bowling along towards the Ledge and the Screamer lying in the eddy. Captain Joe, as he stood with the hook in his hand, watched the sea’s carefully planned attack, and calculated how many minutes were left before it would smother the Ledge in a froth and end all work. He could see, too, the Screamer’s mast rocking ominously in the rising sea. If the wind and tide increased, she must soon shift her position to the eddy on the other side of the Ledge. But no shade of anxiety betrayed him. The steady movement of the tugging men continued, Lonny’s “Heave ho” ringing out cheerily in perfect time. Four of the gang, for better foothold, stood on the concrete, their feet braced to the iron mould band, the water up to their pockets. The others clung with their feet to the slippery rocks. The hook was now within two feet of the steel ring, Captain Joe standing on a rock at a lower level than the others, nearly waist-deep in the sea, getting ready for the final clinch.