“The whole house is yours,” Mary Vanton told him, quietly. “Use it. Come and go as you like. I am making gallons of hot coffee; there will be bacon and bread or hardtack.” He thanked her and praised her with a single glance. “I must be getting outside,” he said, and left. The boys had deserted the south window for one looking east where they could see the life savers bringing up their apparatus on the crest of a dune close by the house. Their mother spoke to them: “John and Guy, bring in wood and get some dry wood up from the cellar and start fires in the fireplaces.” They obeyed willingly enough. Mary went into the kitchen and sped the servant and her daughter in the task of victualling. XV It is bad enough to move Coast Guard apparatus along the level ocean shore, dragging it through the sand, but to move it back from the ocean, up and down over the uneven line of the sand dunes, is more difficult still. When the ocean is up to the foot of the dunes and is biting angrily at their bases this difficult portage has to be made. The Vanton house was not more than a half mile east of the Lone Cove Station, so the Coast Guardsmen’s task was not as bad as it might have been in this respect. Sometimes it is necessary to drag life boats mounted on trucks, and all the other paraphernalia, for several miles. To be able to work with such a base as this big house right at hand was an immense advantage, and to be able to work in the lee of it, more or less huddled under its eastern wall, seemed a piece of fortune hardly less great. Everything else was about the worst it could have been in the circumstances. The darkness was absolute. The gale was of hurricane force, blowing at more than 60 miles an hour. It was early in the evening, not yet ten o’clock, and there was all the night to fight through. The barometer, as Keeper Tom Lupton well knew, was still falling, and the height of the storm had probably not been reached and would not be reached until toward morning. The chance of the sky lightening, until daybreak compelled a recession of the darkness, was almost nil. The chance of the wind abating was no better. And even should the night become a little lighter and the wind lessen, the tremendous seas which were assaulting the sand dunes and breaking over the stranded ship would not go down. It takes hours after a heavy gale for the sea it has kicked up to lessen perceptibly. The wind, against which a man could sometimes hardly stand or keep upon his feet, was not the worst thing for those who had to make the fight to save life from the shore. It was hailing intermittently and the ice particles were fairly driven into the skin of men’s faces like a peppering of fine shot. There was little snow on the ground, which was a thing to be thankful for. More, however, would come later when the wind began to abate.