homes, men, women and children on their knees prayed for the five men on the mast of the Gideon Gant, while the watchers on the shore stared out into the dark and the Albert Loring, standing in deep water, played its searchlight on the mast. It was all any one could do.
Ellen Powell, in her room near Washington Square, New York, was one of the many who prayed; for New York had heard of the men; all the continent heard of them. Their situation, continuing, caught at the minds and hearts of the millions, as nothing else that day; it became the poignant, frightful plight of human beings, doomed slowly and painfully to die in sight of their fellows, helpless to relieve or reach them, and upon their plight, the sensation and sympathy of the millions were spent.
From all the neighborhood of Brebeuf, thousands flocked to the shore to stand and look out. In every city and town with a newspaper, people telephoned, between editions, for news of the men on the mast of the ship sunken in Lake Superior. No tragedy, in months, had so stirred the public. They felt not only the plight of the five men; they felt the challenge to civilization in the helplessness of mankind to save or even to aid, in the slightest, the five men slowly dying in sight of all.
The prayers, which composed the sole possibly effective effort of man, pleaded for the gale to diminish, but the storm, instead, strengthened and worked around out of the north. Freezing weather was on the way. At dawn, again the glasses showed that the five men survived.
