They labored on until evening set in once more, and all hands had just
been ordered aft to secure a broken spar, when Nick the boy uttered a
fearful cry, which gave every man a start. They followed the direction
of his horrified gaze, and saw a danger which paralyzed the stoutest
nerve. Just ahead was a "gray-back,"--sailor parlance for a wave which
is to all other waves as a mountain to a hillock,--and Reuben felt their
doom was sealed, for the old Nautilus, disabled as she was already,
could never stand that terrific onslaught.
With one short, desperate prayer he closed his eyes and clung with the
grip of the dying to the shattered spar.
It was all over in a moment. A roar like a thousand thunders, a stunning
blow impossible to imagine, and then--a broad, wreck-strewn expanse,
amid which those few poor atoms of humanity showed but as black dots for
a moment, soon to be sucked beneath the seething waves.
By dawn of the next day the storm was over, for that gray-back had been
one of those climaxes in which nature seems to delight; and, having done
its worst, the winds hushed their fury, and wailed away into a chill,
sullen, but clearing morning.
The remainder of the fleet, scattered in every direction by the storm,
did not discover the absence of the Nautilus till mid-forenoon, when
bits of wreckage, into which they sailed, soon told the pitiful story.
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