"Give way, men!" cried the lieutenant, on our getting out into the open sea the next moment beyond the hull of the derelict, the coxswain heading the cutter directly for our ship, which had run down to leeward of the wreck so that we could fetch her more easily. "Pull all you can, my lads. Our lives depend on it!" We were about half-way towards the _Candahar_, which had gone about on the port tack, beating to windward and coming up to meet us, the crew of the boat bending their backs and pulling their hardest till the stout ash blades nearly doubled in two with the strain, while the big, rolling sea raced after us, trying to catch us up; when, all of a sudden, the man holding the stroke oar on the after thwart uttered an exclamation which made the lieutenant look behind. "By Jove!" he cried, "we've had a narrow shave." The doctor and I both turned round at this. We were only just in time to see the ill-fated vessel which we had so recently left, rear herself end on and sink beneath the waves, bow foremost! CHAPTER TWENTY. "A BIT OF A BLOW!" The doctor did not like the flippant way in which the lieutenant alluded to our providential escape. "You ought to thank God, Mr Jellaby, with all your heart that you have not gone down in her," he said in a grave and impressive tone, looking him full in the face. "It is far too serious a matter for you to speak of so lightly. Just think, man, we've only been saved by a hair's-breadth from death!" The lieutenant, however, was incorrigible. "A miss is as good as a mile, doctor," he rejoined with a laugh, which made all the boat's crew grin in sympathy, his devil-may-care philosophy appealing more strongly to their sailor nature than the doctor's moral reflections. "Stand by, bows!" On this, the bowmen unshipped their oars with great care, so as not to cause any rocking; and, laying them in dexterously, faced round at the same time, one holding a boathook ready and the other the grapnel with a coil of rope attached, prepared to fling it when we were near enough to the ship. Our gallant vessel was plunging along athwart our course as if she meant to give us the go-by, the sea foaming up at her bows in a big wave that curled up in front of her forefoot and broke over her figurehead as she dipped, sending the surf high in the air in a sheet of foam over her forecastle. Those on board, though, had no intention of abandoning us, as we could quickly see, had we needed any assurance on the point. Just as she was within half a cable's length of our starboard beam, we could hear the sound of the shrill boatswain's pipe above the splash of the sea; when she came up to the wind so close to the cutter that it looked as if she was going to run us down instanter. But, we knew better than that. "Way enough!" shouted Mr Jellaby; and, by an adroit turn of the tiller, the boat's nose shoved in under her lee to port into the slack water made by her hull. "Be ready with that grapnel there forrud!"