After a brief struggle with the wind, now blowing at a speed of over seventy miles an hour, the men who had assembled around the signal station made their way out on to the spray-swept breakwater, and there waited for the coloured rocket from the life-boat which would signify that she had found the wreck. Nearly an hour passed but no sign came from the darkness and boiling sea. Then a light appeared momentarily on the harbour bar and was lost in the smother of white. A few minutes later a grinding crash came from the rocks less than a hundred yards distant from the end of the breakwater. The groups of sailors standing under the lee of the wall, chafing at their apparent helplessness and gazing anxiously out to sea, were suddenly electrified into action by a few sharp orders from the oilskinned commander. A minute or two of seemingly inextricable confusion resulted in the beams of a portable searchlight flashing out from the spray-swept breakwater and lighting up rocks, foam, and a big three-masted Norwegian sailing ship, with sails torn, her fore-mast broken off short and every sea lifting high her stern and driving her farther on to the half-hidden tongues of stone. Even as the light played on her she heeled over to starboard at an angle of about forty-five degrees with an ominous rending of timbers which sounded above the roar of wind and surf. Orders were bellowed through a megaphone, and again men moved quickly in all directions. This time a fiery rocket, bearing a life-line, soared from its tube with a loud hiss and sped across the hundred yards of boiling sea. It straddled the wreck. The thin line it carried was soon exchanged for a stout hawser--hauled from the breakwater--and this was made fast to the stump of the mainmast, which had followed the other "sticks" overboard when the vessel heeled over on the rocks. It was now floating, wrestling and tugging at the mass of confused rigging, and pounding dangerously at the ship's side. One by one the unfortunate Norse crew were hauled over the harbour bar in the breeches-buoy by fifty willing British sailors, and the first to come was the captain's wife and little daughter. There was but one casualty, and that among the rescuers. The stretcher was lifted from the ambulance at the door of the substantially built house standing back from the little town. A white-faced woman ran out into the storm. She had spent a year of nights and days half expecting such as this, and now that it had come the blood seemed to ebb from her body, and at first she scarcely heard a familiar voice assuring her that it was only a cut on the head from a broken wire rope. CHAPTER XIX HOW H.M. TRAWLER NO. 6 LOST HER REFIT