The Alma strained and hammered through the big seas till the seams and butts began to spread, but in lieu of bailing the correspondents chopped ice and flung it overboard.
There was no let-up.
The mad race with winter was on, and the boats tore along in a desperate string.
“W-w-we can’t stop to save our souls!” one of the correspondents chattered, from cold, not fright.
“That’s right!
Keep her down the middle, old man!” the other encouraged.
Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin.
The iron-bound shores were in a lather of foam, and even down the middle the only hope was to keep running away from the big seas.
To lower sail was to be overtaken and swamped.
Time and again they passed boats pounding among the rocks, and once they saw one on the edge of the breakers about to strike.
A little craft behind them, with two men, jibed over and turned bottom up.
“W-w-watch out, old man,” cried he of the chattering teeth.
Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep.
Scores of times had the send of the sea caught the big square stern of the Alma and thrown her off from dead before it till the after leach of the spritsail fluttered hollowly, and each time, and only with all his strength, had he forced her back.
His grin by then had become fixed, and it disturbed the correspondents to look at him.
They roared down past an isolated rock a hundred yards from shore.
From its wave-drenched top a man shrieked wildly, for the instant cutting the storm with his voice.
But the next instant the Alma was by, and the rock growing a black speck in the troubled froth.
“That settles the Yankee!
Where’s the sailor?” shouted one of his passengers.
Rasmunsen shot a glance over his shoulder at a black square-sail.
He had seen it leap up out of the grey to windward, and for an hour, off and on, had been watching it grow.
The sailor had evidently repaired damages and was making up for lost time.
“Look at him come!”
Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch.
Twenty miles of Bennett were behind them—room and to spare for the sea to toss up its mountains toward the sky.
Sinking and soaring like a storm-god, the sailor drove by them.
The huge sail seemed to grip the boat from the crests of the waves, to tear it bodily out of the water, and fling it crashing and smothering down into the yawning troughs.
“The sea’ll never catch him!”
“But he’ll r-r-run her nose under!”
Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a big comber.
The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but the boat did not reappear.
The Alma rushed by the place.
A little riffraff of oats and boxes was seen.
An arm thrust up and a shaggy head broke surface a score of yards away.
For a time there was silence.
As the end of the lake came in sight, the waves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence that the correspondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water out with buckets.
Even this would not do, and, after a shouted conference with Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage.
Flour, bacon, beans, blankets, cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends, everything they could get hands on, flew overboard.
The boat acknowledged it at once, taking less water and rising more buoyantly.
“That’ll do!” Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves to the top layer of eggs.
“The h-hell it will!” answered the shivering one, savagely.
With the exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had sacrificed their outfit.
He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box, and began to worry it out from under the lashing.
“Drop it!
Drop it, I say!”
Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of his arm over the sweep head, was taking aim.
The correspondent stood up on the thwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted with menace and speechless anger.
“My God!”
So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward, into the bottom of the boat.