'Down staysail!' he trumpeted.
The hands were thrilling for the order, and the great sail came with a run, and fell half overboard among the racing foam.

'Jib topsail-halyards! Let the stays'l be,' he said again.
But before it was well uttered, the squall shouted aloud and fell, in a solid mass of wind and rain commingled, on the Farallone; and she stooped under the blow, and lay like a thing dead.

From the mind of Herrick reason fled; he clung in the weather rigging, exulting; he was done with life, and he gloried in the release; he gloried in the wild noises of the wind and the choking onslaught of the rain; he gloried to die so, and now, amid this coil of the elements.

And meanwhile, in the waist up to his knees in water--so low the schooner lay--the captain was hacking at the foresheet with a pocket knife.

It was a question of seconds, for the Farallone drank deep of the encroaching seas.