Text Leveling System

The Wreckers

RDQ:	2603	Max Word/Sent	31	Total Words	4494		Diff Words	1267
Lex	990	Ave Word/.Sent	11	Hi Freq occurs	3324	74%	Hi freq	464	36.6%
AR	6.0	Long Sentences	12.9	Low Freq occurs	418	9.3%	Low freq	306	24.2%

Chapter 
THE WRECK For seven days we ran before the storm. We raced
through waves that seemed enormous, chased by a shrieking wind. We ran toward England under topsails and jib, in a brig called the Isle of Skye. She leaked from every seam, from every hatch and skylight. But she went like a witch mile after mile, wrapped in a shroud of spray.
I was wet and cold, and sometimes frightened. But I loved it all, my first time at sea.
Skye was my father's ship, though he was never a sailor. To him, the sea was a nuisance, and the ship was a thing to be owned, like his carriage and his office desk. "Only owners and admirals," he liked to boast, "can order a captain about." And this rare voyage-Father had called it a ride-was meant to teach me that a scribbling of ledgers was better than a life at sea. "You want to be a sailor?" he'd said. "Why, you'd be driven mad by the boredom."
And he'd laughed. "Or scared out of your wits. So it's one and the same."
But I was never at loose ends, and not once so scared as that. We'd filled the ship with Italian linen and Turkish raisins, and with Spanish wine that we'd loaded on a strange and mysterious night. We'd covered the deck with chicken coops, and then sailed for home. And on the seventh night of our return trip, the barometer was rising.
The cautious little crosses on Captain Stafford's chart showed us seven leagues southwest of Plymouth. But even that was too close to land, and Stafford begged my father to let him heave to until daybreak. "I'm not at all sure where we are," he said.
Father would have none of it. "Raisins," he said, shaking a finger. "Raisins don't keep well in salt air."
So on we went. And an hour before dawn, the Me of Skye hurtled down a wave. She hit the trough in a burst of spray, and water filled the deck. A thousand times we'd done that, and might a thousand more, but now the chickens rose from their perches and hurled themselves, shrieking, against the cages. An old sailor named Finnigan Quick stared at them with horror.
"Land," he said. "They smell the land!"
My father was beside me, his hand clutching a backstay, his scarlet cape flapping in the wind. He lowered his head against the spindrift, then grabbed my collar. His golden ring was cold as ice, and it pressed against my neck as he pulled me right against him.
"Go below," he said. His beard was like hoarfrost on my cheek. "Go, John. You'll not be scared down there."
"But I'm not scared up here," I said. "We're fetching the shore, and-"
He gave me a push, to send me on my way. But I didn't go below; for the first time in all my fourteen years, I disobeyed my father. I climbed to the weather shrouds and hooked myself to them like a spider. And the next wave rolled us over so far that I was lying flat above the sea.
It seemed forever until the ship found her feet again. And then the lookout cried down from the maintop, his voice made ghostly by his speaking trumpet. "Land ho! Land ho!"
He was invisible up there, where the storm clouds tangled in the rigging. It might have been God Himself who hailed us from the heavens.
"Breakers ahead!"
I saw my father stiffen. He looked frightened and lost, like a deer about to flee. At the wheel, the helmsman wrestled with the ship. But Father didn't move, and others came running past him. There was Cridge, the mate, his white hair blowing like a horse's mane. Danny Riggins was beside him, the foretopman from Plymouth. They threw their weight on the wheel and brought the brig to her course. And up from the ship's waist in his dark tarry-breeks came the master.
"Captain Stafford!" cried my father. He clutched at the man's arm.
Stafford shook him off. "Up helm," he shouted. "Up helm and wear ship!"
It might have torn the masts out of her. But the Me of Skye was a good strong ship, and she flung herself round
on a crest. The yards went over with a squeal of blocks. From stem to stern she shivered. Then the wind slammed against her, and she heeled so far that the mainsail yard tore a furrow from the water. Down below, something snapped with a gunshot sound, and I heard the rumble of barrels as the cargo came loose.
A wave as high as the maintop shattered on the weather side and pushed the brig down in the trough. I was under water one moment, then gasping for air, then under again. I heard a man scream, high and shrill.
And after it came the sound of the breakers. It was a thrumming, throbbing noise. It was a low pulse, like a heartbeat. My father's head came up, turning like a hawk's. And suddenly, like a thunderclap, the mizzen topsail shredded into rags and rope.
The Idle of Skye came upright, then settled again with the scuppers in the sea, water tumbling over the rail.
"As you bear," yelled Captain Stafford. He raised his head, his hands cupped round his mouth. "Masthead there," he screamed.
But the lookout had disappeared.
A man came aft with a dripping wet rag in his hands. "The pumps," he said. "They're clogged with something." "With what?" said Stafford.
"Sawdust, I think." He shook out his rag, and a flurry of red-colored shavings scattered to the deck.
Father gazed at them with something like horror. Only later would I learn what he saw in those shavings, what terrible message was written in the sawdust. At the time, I thought only of the pumps.
"Can you clear them?" asked Stafford.
"We'll try." The rag was the man's cap. He wrung it out and put it on as he staggered forward again.
The ship hurtled on. Spray swept over the deck like a series of rainstorms, blinding the men at the helm. But above them, in the shrouds, I could see the shoreline and the glimmer of breaking waves.
And then the lights.
There were two of them, one above the other, like golden eyes shining in the darkness. I sprang from the shrouds and raced down the deck. "Lights," I cried, and tugged my father's billowing cape. "Lights."
He was angry at first, furious to see me. Then he understood, and he grabbed my arm. "Where?" he said. "There!"
He sighted along my arm, and Stafford did the same. The brig rose from a trough, and the lights were nearly dead ahead. Then a third appeared, tossed by the wind, as though from the mast of a ship.
The captain frowned. "Now what the devil is all this?" "A beacon," said Father. He laughed. "A harbor." "Maybe," said Stafford. "But which one?" "Plymouth!" Father cried.
Riggins stomped up the slope of the deck. He winked at me, then put a huge hand on his beard and squeezed out half a pint of water. "T'aint Plymouth," he said. "I was born and raised thereabouts, and I'll tell you that much. T'aint Portloe neither, nor Salcombe nor Fowey."
"Damn your eyes!" my father roared. "What does it matter where it isn't?"
Poor Riggins reared back as though Father had hit him. "It's nowhere, is what I mean," he mumbled. "Nowheres I know."
My father gave him an awful stare, full of fear and anger. In London he would never have raised his voice like that, not to the lowest of clerks. The wind swirled his cape around him.
"Make for the harbor," he said.
Captain Stafford touched his arm. "We'll have daylight in an hour, Mr. Spencer. We could stand off and wait--" Or sink like a stone," said Father. "We've got torn sails and a bilge full of water and no pumps to lift it out. And now we've got a beacon to guide us.
"I don't like it," said Stafford. A sheet of spray hurled against us. "I haven't liked this voyage from the start. Loading cargo in the dead of night. Skulking like thieves. I don't know what you're up to, Mr. Spencer, but-"
"Watch your tongue!" snapped Father. We were making leeway by the second. The sound of surf rolled like giant drums, louder and louder still. "This is my ship, and you'll do as I say. Now, I'm telling you to take it in."
Stafford turned away. He wasn't happy, but he would do it. He put his hands to his mouth and shouted his orders. "Hands to sail stations! Square to the wind!" The helmsmen cranked the wheel around, hand over hand on the spokes.
"Wear-O! "yelled Stafford.
The Isle of Skye swung quickly round until her gaunt finger of a bowsprit pointed straight at the beacons. Riggins frowned. Then he saw me watching, and fixed a
smile in place. He always had a smile for me, though never before so grim as that.
"Aloft with you, John," said Stafford. "You're our eyes now."
I watched those lights as though they marked the gates of heaven. I stared so hard that my eyes ached. And when the uppermost light seemed to slide off to one side, I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted at the helm. "Starboard!"
The bowsprit jogged across the clouds. "Steady as you go!" I sang out.
Cridge peered at the compass and scratched his wooly head.
The band of surf swept closer, a headland jutting out. We flashed past it and reeled on toward the beacons, across a bay where fires burned along the shore. Then, as I watched, the lights parted, though the brig had strayed not at all from her course.
"This isn't right," said Cridge.
We heard the beat of surf again, but from ahead this time. And a different sound now, a rumbling avalanche that grew louder by the moment.
And then I saw it, we all did, a patch of sea turned white by foam and spindrift. The waves broke on jagged slabs of rock roaring and bursting high in spouts of spray.
"The Tombstones," cried Riggins. "God save us! We're on the Tombstones."
"Put the helm down," the captain shouted. "Luff up or she's lost!"
The brig rolled as the bowsprit swung below the beacons. In the eerie glow of a burning dawn I saw figures up along the clifftop, and a line of land that almost ringed our little ship. She was turning quickly, rounding up to the wind. And she was almost at the eye when she struck the rocks with a jolt that knocked me from the shrouds.
The ship bounced free, then struck again, so hard the topmast broke. It toppled slowly at first, then hurtled down in a tangle of rigging. The wheel spun madly.
The first wave crashed broadside into the ship, flinging chunks of rail high into the rigging. The second carried away the longboat and shattered the windows of the stern cabin. The poor Isle of Skye groaned like a living thing.
My father, up to his knees in water, struggled toward me with his hands held out before him. The third wave fell across us, and dragged me down the deck. I reached up. "Help me," I said. I couldn't swim. Then I was tumbling down in a cold black wave, sucked backward to the sea.
Chapter  A DROWNING
The sand was cold against my cheek, and gritty. It felt a bit like my father's beard, and I suppose I'd been dreaming of him when I came awake. I was lying on my side, high up the beach, and the ground shook from the surf that hammered down along the shore. It was full daylight, but gray and somber, and I had no idea how much time had passed. It hurt to move, to even breathe my throat was burning from seawater. But I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked round.
The sky was filled with gulls. They soared in huge, lazy circles, overlapping like the wheels and cogs of an engine. There were scores of them, all crying as they dipped and twirled.
I was nestled in a mass of bull kelp, the thick cords slick and wet against my bare arms. And when I shifted, they went slithering over my skin like giant eels. My jacket had been torn away, and two slats from a chicken coop were
bound on my wrist like a flimsy manacle. There were scraps of wood all round, and heaps of barrel staves from our cargo of wine.
The beach formed a half circle of glistening sand, a cove broken by reefs and backed by precipitous cliffs. I lay just above the water and just behind a rocky ledge that broke the surf along my bit of shore. Behind it, in an arc along the beach, the combers rolled in-lines of pale green water with streaks of sand in them. And beyond that, the hull of the Idle of Skye lay upon a shelf of twisted rocks that jutted up like rows of gravestones.
It was an awful sight to wake up to. The masts were broken stumps, the deck a shattered ruin. Half the planks had been torn from the hull, and in places I could see right through the ribs to the insides of the ship. My father's cabin lay split apart, his ledgers and books spilling from the table, his chest and chairs and carpets heaped against the hull. The deckhouse was gone, or most of it, and the brig's massive bones stood above the bay like the skeleton of a rotting whale, black against the sky. On the lee side, topmasts, yards, and bowsprit drifted alongside the wreck in a snarl of rigging. Barrels bobbed all across the bay.
In the surf a cable's length away, a body rolled in the waves. He wore seamen's clothes, striped and patched; his hair was pigtailed and tarred. As each wave came in, the dead man rose up the beach, then slipped away, tumbling down the sand. Then he turned and lay supine, fixing me with a horrid, toothy grin.
It was a sailor I'd known as Tom, and he'd taught me how to splice. His fingers, strong as marline spikes, now
were bent and swollen. When the next breaker came in, up he went again, arms waving as though he were beckoning me to join him. Many times I had sat with Tom, but now I shuddered and turned away.
There were other bodies in the sand, scattered here and there, each a dark and huddled shape that was once a friend of mine.
And then I saw the men, across the bay, three of them coming toward me. They wore coats with big shoulder capes that flew about them like battle flags. They were kicking at the wreckage, bending down sometimes to pick up bits of flotsam, nudging at the bodies as though looking for survivors. And above them, the seagulls circled like a swirling cloud.
I tried calling out, but only a gurgle came from my throat, a strangled sound and a dribble of water. But they were coming to help, if I would only lie and wait. And I watched as they paced along the beach in a ragged, windblown line. They stopped at the body of a sailor lying sprawled on the sand. One of the caped men-he had a black beard square as a shovel blade--bent down and raised the head by its tousle of hair. I swallowed and coughed, and tried again to shout.
"This one's dead," said the bearded man. He opened his fingers and let the head drop back to the sand. "Is that the lot of 'em, then?"
I tugged and pulled at the kelp. I kicked at it, afraid they would pass me by.
One of the men pointed. He shouted, "There's another." But instead of coming toward me, they angled off to the
water's edge, down to a sheltered pool behind a reef of jagged rock. A sailor lay there, not quite ashore but not quite afloat, one hand fixed like a claw to a clutch of mussels. When he raised his head I saw it was old Cridge with his white hair plastered down, his eyes swollen and red. He hadn't the strength to pull himself from the sea--he could barely hold his mouth above it-and his legs swung to and fro in the surge of water.
The men waded in, their big seaboots kicking up white froth, their coats streaming back, the oilskin thrumming in the wind like slack jibs. They stood in an arc round him, their hands on their hips. When Cridge looked up at them I saw on his face an expression of utter, wretched fear. And then the man in the middle raised his boot and set it down on Cridge's head. He did it slowly, deliberately; he put his heel on the crown of the mate's head, and pushed it under the water.
I wanted to cry out, but dared not. These men weren't rescuers. They hadn't come to save us, but to kill us. And I could only watch as Cridge's hand came free from the mussels, came groping up to claw at the man's rolled-down boot top. His other hand swept up, streaming water, and clutched on beside it. His legs thrashed and kicked.
But the man didn't move. He only stood there and put more of his weight on that foot, and the water bubbled around his boot through a mat of snowy hair. Old Cridge flailed and splashed in the shallow pool, his motions growing frantic, and then subsiding. But the man paid the drowning sailor no more attention than he'd give to a dog pawing at his foot. He took a pipe from his pocket, tamped
the bowl with his thumb, and then shook the stem toward the wreck of the Isle of Skye.
"Right square on the Tombstones," said he. "Bad bit of luck there."
"We brought her in, Caleb," said the man on his right. "Oh, we did that. But half a cable on either side, and she'd be lying high and dry, and there for the picking." Then he clucked and spat, and the caped men stood ragged in the wind, their backs toward me, staring at the wreck. In a flash I was up. I shook off the last tangles of kelp, cast away the slats from my wrist. I took a step back, another. One of Cridge's hands slid down the man's boot, and I saw the fingernails torn away, the smears of blood they left on the oiled leather. The man they called Caleb pressed harder, but with no more thought or care. He just pushed with his boot as he shook his pipe and talked.
"Still, with this sea running, she'll be down to splinters and chips by nightfall," he said. "Won't be nothing left but the ballast stones."
I turned and ran. It was no more than five yards to the rocks, but it seemed a mile. My boots sank in the sand. I stumbled, caught myself, stumbled again. I kicked at the sand, grabbed at it; I half crawled and half ran. At every moment I expected a shout behind me, a cry of alarm. And then I was up among the rocks, into a crevice at the cliffs, and when I looked back the men were still standing in the shallows. Poor old Cridge floated at their feet like a straw man. Then I saw with dread the tracks that I'd left, the marks, as though a whole regiment had fled along the
beach. And without a second's pause, I turned and tackled the cliff.
The rocks were slick with rain and spray. Three times I nearly fell; twice I hung by my fingertips from bare nubs of stone, my feet swinging in air sixty feet above the sand. Once I sent a little spray of pebbles skittering down, and pressed myself against the rock, waiting for that shout from below.
As I climbed, the bay opened below me. I saw the fires, still burning, women gathered around them in billowing shawls. Where a rutted track emerged from the gully, wagons were drawn up on the sand, wild-haired ponies standing in slack harness. Men labored back and forth, carrying boxes and barrels and armfuls of wood, staggering back-bent under piles of linens and clothes. One hauled up a sailor's sea chest over his shoulder. Another dragged a long snake of rope. They dropped their things in haphazard piles, and at each stack a child sat guarding the treasures, as though these men who plundered the wreck might also steal from each other.
Then I reached up my hand and felt, not rock, but a warm stubble of grass. And I pulled myself to the top, and crouched on a narrow ridge. It dropped nearly as steeply on the other side, down to a harbor and a little village on its far shore. The buildings there were whitewashed, roofed with thatch or with copper turned green by the salt air. A cart went weaving up a narrow lane, and beside it, with her load of sticks, walked a woman in ivory shawls. Boats lay dry on the tide, each reflected in the shallows of a river that came down under a bridge of arched stone. On
the hill above the village stood a church. There was safety there, and rescue, if only I could reach it.
The wind pulled me and pushed me; it swept like a scythe through the yellowed grass and on from there-forever, it seemed-across a desolate moor. Wave after wave of low, barren hills marched to the sky, and not a single tree stood among them. Yet a pair of ponies grazed just a hundred yards from the clifftop, hobbled and heads down.
I took a step toward them. They lifted their heads, manes streaming back.
And then it came. A shout of anger, a shrill cry of alarm. One voice at first, and then many. And on the beach below, two men started up the cliff. I ran. I raced across that narrow ridge, up toward the moor, on toward the ponies. I heard the creak of wagon wheels, the crack of a whip. Horses snorted, and hooves pounded on the road.
The ponies gazed at me. They turned toward me, and on their sides I saw lanterns hung by leather straps, the glass on one tinted green, the door swinging open. And I knew then what I'd seen from the ship, the beacons that had led us to the Tombstones. They were the lights of wreckers, borne by ponies across the hilltops. These men had carefully, willfully, led our ship to its doom.
And then from the ground behind the ponies, from a hollow in the hills, the wagon came sailing up from the moor in a cloud of frothing dust.
The driver sat hunched forward, his arms lashing with the reins. He looked like a bird, like a raven. The wagon careened around a bend and came straight toward me. The
horses were black as tar, glistening with sweat. I could hear their breaths, the thunder of their hooves now on the roadbed, now on the grass.
Ahead was the moor, vast and empty. On each side and behind, the sea stretched from headland to headland, from sky to sky, flecked with the whitecaps of great rolling waves. I had nowhere to go.
The wagon came rushing on. And the men burst from the clifftop behind me, staggering up the slope with their hands pumping at their knees.
I swung to my left and threw myself over the brink. For an instant there was no sound at all. I seemed to float in that one long second, above the little harbor and village. Then I hit the slope with a thud, rolled and skidded, tumbled and caught myself, tumbled again.
I didn't look back, I didn't look down. I only let myself fall, grabbing when I could at bushes and rock, taking each shock with my knees and my arms, hurtling down in an avalanche of pebbles and dirt. And I spilled out at the bottom, arms wheeling as I stumbled backward across the beach, stumbled and twirled and, finally, fell spread-eagled in the shallows.
I felt I could lie there a long time, with the gulls circling high above, the clouds like a fleet of sailing ships as the sun at last burned through. Across the harbor, sunlight shone on whitewashed walls, on window glass and weathercocks. Beyond the row of seaside buildings, above the homes, the bell tower of the great stone church beckoned. I climbed to my feet and headed toward it.
Suddenly the,water beside me erupted in a geyser of
white froth. I heard a clap, felt the ground thud. On the other side, the water burst into a towering column, and then again behind me.
"Get 'im!" The voice came from above me. I had to shield my eyes from the sun to see the men there, gaunt silhouettes. One of them moved, and an instant later the water exploded again, so close that drops splashed on my face. The men were hurling rocks the size of cannonballs.
I ran along the waterline, weaving and ducking. The rocks came faster, splashing in the water to my left, crashing into the shale and sand to my right.
And straight ahead, a plume of dust swirled across the valley. The wagon was racing for the bridge.
I crossed the river, weaving round boats, sprinting for the seawall. I could hear the wagon wheels chattering on the bridge, the shouts of the driver urging on his horses. I reached the wall, only to find the stones slick with weeds. Behind me, the men had started down the cliff.
Along the wall I ran. Gasping. Legs aching. A boat lay prow to the wall, and I stumbled across it. And just beyond there, I found steps. Up I went to a long and empty street paved with cobblestones. On both sides, the buildings rose in overhanging tiers, closing in toward the top.
Somewhere ahead, horses' hooves rang on the paving stones.
I hurried to my left, toward a lane that seemed to lead upward to the church. At the corner was an inn, the Jack-a-Dandy, with a sign of a clown hung from a beam. Across from it hunched a crumbled old blockhouse with a low, open doorway.

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Multiple speakers

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Dialog: Unlabeled Speaker

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Some Long/Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Several unrelated ideas

Concepts: Abstract/Complex Social

Chapters

Headings

Features

Character traits

Integral Setting

Complex Problem/Solution

Clear cause/effect

First Person

Difficult names

Dialect/Accents

Topic

Right/Wrong

Danger

Endangerment

Ships

Crime

Rescue

*Citizenship & Laws

*Feelings, Behaviors

Low Frequency Words

ached	aching	admirals	afloat	aft
aloft	alongside	angled	arched	avalanche
backstay	ballast	barometer	barren	beacon
beacons	beckoned	beckoning	bilge	billowing
blockhouse	boredom	borne	bowsprit	breeks
brig	brig's	broadside	cable's	cannonballs
careened	cargo	carriage	cautious	circling
clifftop	cobblestones	column	combers	compass
coop	cranked	crevice	crouched	deckhouse
deliberately	desolate	disobeyed	drawn	dread
drowning	eagled	eerie	emerged	fetching
figures	flailed	flecked	fleet	flimsy
flotsam	flung	flurry	foretopman	frantic
froth	frothing	furious	furrow	gasping
gaunt	gazed	geyser	ghostly	glimmer
glistening	gritty	groping	guarding	guide
gulls	gully	gunshot	gurgle	hailed
haired	hammered	haphazard	harbor	harness
headland	heartbeat	heave	heeled	helm
helmsman	helmsmen	hoarfrost	hobbled	hollow
hooves	horrid	horror	hull	hunched
hurled	hurling	hurtled	hurtling	idle
im	instant	invisible	isle	ivory
jagged	jibs	jogged	jolt	jutted
jutting	kelp	labored	lanterns	lashing
leagues	ledge	ledgers	leeway	linen
linens	longboat	lowered	luff	madly
mainsail	maintop	manacle	manes	marline
massive	mast	masthead	masts	mizzen
moor	motions	mussels	mysterious	nestled
nightfall	nowhere	nowheres	nubs	nudging
nuisance	oiled	oilskin	overhanging	overlapping
paced	parted	patched	pause	pawing
peered	perches	pigtailed	pint	planks
plastered	plume	plundered	plymouth	portloe
precipitous	pulse	ragged	raisins	raven
reared	reef	reefs	reeled	reflected
regiment	reins	rescuers	ridge	rigging
riggins	ringed	roadbed	rotting	rounding
rutted	sailor	salcombe	sawdust	scarlet
scuppers	scythe	seaboots	seagulls	seamen's
seaside	seawall	seawater	second's	series
seventh	shale	shallow	shallows	shavings
shawls	sheltered	shield	shone	shoreline
shovel	shrill	shrouds	silhouettes	skidded
skittering	skulking	skylight	slack	slithering
soared	somber	southwest	spat	spencer
spilling	spindrift	splice	splinters	spouts
sprang	sprawled	sprinting	staggered	staggering
starboard	stations	staves	stern	stiffen
strayed	stubble	subsiding	supine	surf
surge	survivors	swallowed	sweat	swept
swirled	swirling	swollen	t'aint	tamped
tangle	tangled	tangles	tarred	tarry
thatch	thereabouts	thieves	thrashed	thrumming
thunderclap	tiers	tinted	tombstones	topmast
toppled	topsail	tousle	towering	trough
turkish	uppermost	upright	upward	urging
utter	voyage	waterline	weathercocks	weaving
wheeling	whitecaps	whitewashed	willfully	windblown
wooly	wreckage	wreckers	wrestled	wretched
wrist	yellowed