The
Spaniard's boat was lashed so that no mortal could get her clear, and
the little craft was used as a sort of lumber-closet. Glenn had noticed
some steel rails in the boat, and he guessed that these specimens of
railway plant were accidentally left out until the hatches had been
battened down.
He thanked God for the negligence.
Working with desperate speed, he rudely bent the spare sail to the spar;
then to the lower cloth of the sail he managed to fix two of the weighty
rails, and then commenced to lug the yard past the vessel's foremast. It
takes a long time to tell all this, but Joe was not long, though every
movement was made at the risk of his life. He hacked away two lengths of
rope measuring each about eighty feet; he made these into bridles,
knotting one end of each piece to the end of the spar, and taking the
other ends round the timber-heads. Two pieces of thin rope, hauled out
of the hamper aft, were made fast to the ends of the steel rails, and
then Joe made a frantic effort to get his apparatus over the side.
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