The corpulent captain of the great wrecking tug _Sovereign_, lying
outside the breakers off Jones Inlet, megaphoned this insult to the
deck of the _Fledgling_, as she drew near the scene of the wreck,
rising and falling on the waves like a piece of driftwood.

It was a deadly day. The promise of the sunlight had waned with the
earlier hours, and heavy blue-black clouds palled the heavens. Not one
hundred yards apart lay the two tugs, rolling and pitching in the
seaway; the _Fledgling_ trim and stanch, the _Sovereign_ big and
cumbersome, the funnel belching thunderclouds of sepia, her derrick
booms creaking and rattling and slatting infernally.

Straight on ahead, where the line of swelling waves burst into
breakers, where the spume sang like whip-lashes, and where the whine of
the wind tore itself into a nasty snarl, lay the wreck of the schooner
_Zeitgeist_. She lay half on her side and the waves licked up and over
the faded gray hull, completing the work that time already had begun.
One mast was very far forward, the other very far aft--Great Lake rig;
and between the two was a deck-load of thousands of feet of Maine
lumber. The topmasts had snapped off, leaving the stumps.

Lashed in the foremast were two men; and in the mainmast were Captain
Ephraim Sayles and three more of his crew. At first glance they seemed
lifeless; at first glance, indeed, they seemed nothing more than faded
lengths of canvas. But an occasional lifting of a hand, a flash of a
gray face, showed that they were men and that they still lived and
hoped. Under them, over the deck raced the breakers, waist deep, each
one a swift, excited trip-hammer. It was only the lumber that was
holding the aged hull together. As it was, sections of the sides had
ripped out and planks and pieces of deal issuing from the gashes