"What you're going for is to save life, not to drown your boat's
crew for nothing," he growled severely in my ear. But as we shoved
off he leaned over and cried out: "It all rests on the power of
your arms, men. Give way for life!"

We made a race of it, and I would never have believed that a common
boat's crew of a merchantman could keep up so much determined
fierceness in the regular swing of their stroke. What our captain
had clearly perceived before we left had become plain to all of us
since. The issue of our enterprise hung on a hair above that abyss
of waters which will not give up its dead till the Day of Judgment.
It was a race of two ship's boats matched against Death for a prize
of nine men's lives, and Death had a long start. We saw the crew
of the brig from afar working at the pumps--still pumping on that
wreck, which already had settled so far down that the gentle, low
swell, over which our boats rose and fell easily without a check to
their speed, welling up almost level with her head-rails, plucked
at the ends of broken gear swinging desolately under her naked
bowsprit.

We could not, in all conscience, have picked out a better day for
our regatta had we had the free choice of all the days that ever
dawned upon the lonely struggles and solitary agonies of ships
since the Norse rovers first steered to the westward against the
run of Atlantic waves. It was a very good race. At the finish
there was not an oar's length between the first and second boat,
with Death coming in a good third on the top of the very next
smooth swell, for all one knew to the contrary. The scuppers of
the brig gurgled softly all together when the water rising against
her sides subsided sleepily with a low wash, as if playing about an