Fire Island | Page 6

came rattling and crashing down, literally bombarding the deck, while to add to the horror the black darkness began to give place to a blood-red lurid glare. Toward this they were now being drawn, slowly at first, then faster and faster: as, after the three waves that had struck the vessel, another came towering on astern, threatening to engulf them, but plunging beneath the stern, lifting and bearing them along upon its tremendous crest with a rush and deafening hissing roar. Faster and faster, and on and toward the deep glow now right ahead.
Oliver Lane was clinging to the fore shrouds and awake to the fact that his two friends, Panton and Drew, were at his side, for their faces loomed out of the black darkness, lit up by the blood-red glow from which now came a perceptible sense of heat. The next moment they were joined by the mate, who yelled to them, his voice plainly heard over the hiss and roar,--
"Earthquake wave! It's all over now."
He said no more, and they all clung there, with the vessel still balanced accurately upon the huge crest and borne on at almost express speed.
In his agony of despair and horror Lane now glanced to right and left to see by the blood-red glow the rolling hill of water upon which he rode spreading out to right and left, while from the clouds above it was as if the whole of the firmament were casting down its stars in one great shower of light as the fiery stones came rushing, hissing into the sea and many of them crashing upon the doomed ship.
Death was upon them in its most awful form, and as the young man was conscious of two hands gripping his arms, a voice close to his ear shouted,--
"The end of all things, my lad; we can never live through this!"
CHAPTER TWO.
A BIT OF BLUE.
As if to endorse these words there was once more a deafening explosion, the blood-red glow toward which they were being driven suddenly flashed out into a burst of light so dazzling that all present covered their blinded eyes; a spurt of fiery blocks of incandescent stone curved over and fell into the boiling sea, and as the occupants of the deck were driven prostrate by the shock which followed, silence and darkness once more reigned.
"Much hurt, sir?"
Oliver Lane heard those words quite plainly, and lay wondering who it was that was hurt, and why he did not answer so kindly an inquiry.
Then, as a hand was laid upon his shoulder, he grasped the fact that it was the mate who was speaking, and that he was the object of the sailor's solicitude.
"I--I don't know," he said, making an effort to sit up, and succeeding. "Whatever is the matter? My head aches a good deal."
"No wonder, my lad, seeing how you were pitched against the mast. But you won't hurt now. I doctored it as well as I could. It bled pretty freely, and that will keep the wound wholesome."
"Bled?" said the young fellow wonderingly, as he raised his hand, and found that a thick bandage was round his forehead.
"Yes; we were all thrown down when she struck, but you got the worst of it."
"She struck?--the ship? Then we have all been wrecked?"
"Well, yes," said the mate, giving his head a vicious kind of rub; "I suppose we must call it a wreck. Anyhow, we're ashore."
"And it isn't so dark?" said Oliver, rising to his feet and feeling so giddy that he caught at the nearest rope to save himself from falling.
"No, it isn't so dark, for the clouds are passing away. We shall have daylight directly."
"Morning?"
"No; it's quite late to-morrow afternoon," said the mate grimly.
"But I don't hear that thundering now?"
"No; it's all over seemingly, thank goodness," said the mate, as his injured companion looked wonderingly up at the thick, blackened clouds still hanging overhead, and listened quite expectant for the next terrible detonation. "I began to think we were going to be carried along full speed into some awful fiery hole on the top of that wave, and that when we struck the water was going on to put out the fire, and I suppose it did."
"What?" cried Lane, looking round him, and then at the mate, to see if he were in his right senses.
"Yes, you may look, Mr Lane," he said. "I'm all right, only a bit scared; I know what I'm saying, and as soon as it get's light enough you'll see."
"But I don't understand."
"No, nor anybody else, sir, but Nature, who's been having a regular turn up. I s'pose you know that we were in for a great eruption?"
"Yes, of course."
"And somehow mixed up with the storm, there was an earthquake?"
"No, I did not grasp that, only that we were