Keeper Tom marshalled his men and his machinery as close as possible to the Vanton house. Within forty minutes from the time he himself finished speaking with Richard Hand, his men and his apparatus were posted and he was ready to begin operations. In the meantime, Dick Hand had bumped against him in the blackness and shouted indistinctly: “Tommy!... Dick! Anything you want ... help you....” “Thanks!” the keeper had bawled back with his hands on his old friend’s shoulders. The little cannon began booming and a thin line began whipping seaward. Nothing was visible. What those ashore would have seen, if there had been light, was a three-masted ship which had struck the outer bar and had been driven past that until she lay on the inner bar, so far inshore that it might have been possible to wade to her at low tide in peaceful weather. The stress of her blow on the outer bar and the pounding to which she had been subjected in being driven past it, as well as the continuous assault she was now under, had battered her very badly. She had not opened up at her seams but would, and at almost any instant. Her foremast had been carried away completely--snapped off a few feet above her deck. Some of her yards--the spars carrying her sails--were gone; two of these dangled loosely, menacing the lives of any one on her decks. But there was no one on her decks. All hands had, of necessity, taken to the rigging. They could just be glimpsed by the flare of her rocketing distress signals--little dark figures in the maintop, in the topgallant crosstrees, in the mizzen shrouds. They appeared not at all human. They seemed to be nothing but slight lumps or warts on the fine tracery of the rigging, the slender filaments of masts and yards and stays, wood, wire and rope, limned against the formidable blackness in which sky and sea met each other and were indistinguishable. No boat, of course, could live for a moment in the sea that was raging. The only chance was in getting a line to the vessel. And in doing that every instant counted. The first shots with the line were useless, as was to have been expected. It was necessary to determine direction and drift, and to make a heavy and exact allowance for windage. The ship lay directly south, the gale was from the southwest. The line had to be shot almost straight against the wind, which then carried it to the south. But so shot, it became evident that it was falling short. A heavier charge was used and still the line fell short. “We can’t stay here,” bellowed Keeper Tom who, when he wanted to give an order, was under the practical necessity of bawling it separately in each man’s ear. “We’ll have to leave the lee of the house and go to windward, well to windward.”