If it had only answered to our thoughts! How slow it crawled, without haste or flurry, sometimes seeming to drop dormant as if to take us off our guard. Presently, what with the strain and our shivering, we were fain to squat gingerly upon the sand, and grip, and watch, setting our chattering teeth. What if our expectations were to be cruelly baffled after all! What if the spar were anchored by some unexpected unseen grapnel to the bank! I turned sick at the thought. The water by now lipped along it, covering some three feet of its end. And still, to any gentle test of pulling it responded nothing. Suddenly, eccentric as always in its motions, the tide bowled a succession of heavier wavelets shorewards. The first found us sitting, the rope taut between us and the spar, and left us sprawling backwards in a puddle of water. I thought the mere wash of it had upset us, till, in the midst of my spluttering and clutching to recover purchase, I heard my friend sing out-- “Get up! Hold on! Dick! O, come, come!” Then, scrambling, gasping, to my feet, I saw what had happened. The spar, answering to our strain in the bobble of water, had swung towards us, the rope had slackened, and over we had tumbled. Chattering with excitement, we got hold once more, and pulled. Still it did not come free, nor for long minutes yet. We tugged and hauled what we dared, and ceased, and tugged again. Not--to cut short that tale of agony and suspense--until we were ankle deep in water; not until the rush of little incoming waves foamed high on the stern of _The Good Hope_, kicking her up, and loosening her nip on that grim-held relic of her own; not until the sands were whelmed near and far, so that we seemed to sprout, three fantastic trunks of humanity, from the surface of the ocean itself, did a great surge and vortex, answering to our last despairing wrench, show us that we had been successful. And even then some dreadful moments passed--moments of terror lest the rope had given--before the mass, rolling sluggishly to the surface, revealed itself. We were panting and sobbing as we hauled it in. But Harry kept his wits through all. “Get astride, Dick,” he said, “and help me to fasten this home.” “This” was the running gear, which he wanted to dispose about the spar in such way as to give us all some hold to cling by. We wrought quick and hard, and in a little had it looped to our satisfaction. The wreckage consisted of a huge segment of a main lower and top-mast, with the step, pretty complete, and the whole of the over-lapping part bolted snug, on either side of which the great sticks had snapped. It was in all some twenty feet long, perhaps, with rings and shroud fastenings and cut ends of rigging yet attached; and it floated massive, on an even keel, so to speak, so that in places we could even walk on it without fear of upsetting in that tranquil sea. “Now,” said Harry at last, “to get to Mr. Pilbrow!”