It is bad enough to move Coast Guard apparatus along the level ocean shore, dragging it through the sand, but to move it back from the ocean, up and down over the uneven line of the sand dunes, is more difficult still. When the ocean is up to the foot of the dunes and is biting angrily at their bases this difficult portage has to be made.

The Vanton house was not more than a half mile east of the Lone Cove Station, so the Coast Guardsmen’s task was not as bad as it might have been in this respect. Sometimes it is necessary to drag life boats mounted on trucks, and all the other paraphernalia, for several miles.

To be able to work with such a base as this big house right at hand was an immense advantage, and to be able to work in the lee of it, more or less huddled under its eastern wall, seemed a piece of fortune hardly less great.

Everything else was about the worst it could have been in the circumstances. The darkness was absolute. The gale was of hurricane force, blowing at more than 60 miles an hour. It was early in the evening, not yet ten o’clock, and there was all the night to fight through. The barometer, as Keeper Tom Lupton well knew, was still falling, and the height of the storm had probably not been reached and would not be reached until toward morning. The chance of the sky lightening,[275] until daybreak compelled a recession of the darkness, was almost nil. The chance of the wind abating was no better. And even should the night become a little lighter and the wind lessen, the tremendous seas which were assaulting the sand dunes and breaking over the stranded ship would not go down. It takes hours after a heavy gale for the sea it has kicked up to lessen perceptibly.

The wind, against which a man could sometimes hardly stand or keep upon his feet, was not the worst thing for those who had to make the fight to save life from the shore. It was hailing intermittently and the ice particles were fairly driven into the skin of men’s faces like a peppering of fine shot. There was little snow on the ground, which was a thing to be thankful for. More, however, would come later when the wind began to abate.

Keeper Tom marshalled his men and his machinery as close as possible to the Vanton house. Within forty minutes from the time he himself finished speaking with Richard Hand, his men and his apparatus were posted and he was ready to begin operations. In the meantime, Dick Hand had bumped against him in the blackness and shouted indistinctly:

“Tommy!... Dick! Anything you want ... help you....”

“Thanks!” the keeper had bawled back with his hands on his old friend’s shoulders.

[276]The little cannon began booming and a thin line began whipping seaward.

Nothing was visible. What those ashore would have seen, if there had been light, was a three-masted ship which had struck the out............