Jimmy closed his glasses with a snap, and hailing a very wet seaman sent him for the engineer. The latter climbed to the bridge, and nodded when he glanced at the vessel.
"Well," he said, "you'll have to take them off. She's not going to claw off shore without her mainsail. There would be a little money in the thing if we could tow her, but we can't. I'm taking steep chances of bringing the engines down about my head by shoving her into it as I'm doing."
As though to give point to the speech, the _Shasta_ flung her stern high just then, and shook in every plate as with a frantic clanging the engines ran away. Then she put her bows in, and dim crag and wallowing schooner were blotted out by a cloud of spray.
"We have got to try," said Jimmy quietly. "There's a point that would give us shelter twenty miles away."
"Twenty miles!" and the engineer, from whose blackened singlet the water streamed, laughed scornfully. "It's 'bout as likely we'd tow her to Honolulu. Still, I guess you're skipper."
Jimmy nodded. He had not troubled to impress the fact upon his crew, but he invariably acted on it. "You had better raise a little more steam," he said; "it is very likely that we'll want it."
Then, as the dripping engineer vanished from the bridge, he seized the whistle lanyard, and signed to the man behind him who gripped the wheel. A deep blast rent the turmoil of the sea, and the _Shasta_, swinging around a trifle, rolled away to the rescue. It was some twenty minutes later when she stopped, and lay plunging head to sea with the little wallowing schooner close to lee of her. The light was going, but Jimmy could see a shapeless figure that clung to her rail gesticulating with flung-up arm. The wreck of a boat, apparently smashed by the falling mast, lay across her hatch, and there was another half-seen man at her wheel. Jimmy stood still for a few moments with his hand on the telegraph, and he was glad to remember that there were several former sealing-schooner hands among his crew, for what they do not know about boat-work is worth no man's learning.
He let the _Shasta_ swing a little to give them a lee on one side of her, and while the sea smote and spouted in green cataracts across her weather-rail they swung a boat over, and two men, one of whom was a Siwash, dropped into her. That was enough to steer her while she blew to windward, and Jimmy dared risk no more. They got her away, apparently undamaged, and he sent the _Shasta_ slowly ahead when she plunged over a seatop veiled in a cloud of spray. It would be beyond the power of flesh and blood to pull that boat back, and the _Shasta_ swung in a wide half-circle to leeward of the schooner. Her crew had evidently tried to heave her to, but without her after-canvas she had fallen off again, and was forging ahead with the _Shasta_'s boat smothered in foam beneath her rail. She was going to leeward bodily, and Jimmy fancied she was about a mile nearer the crag than when he had first seen her. It was evident to everybody that he had no time to lose.