They had even saved for them some items of baggage.

In a few hours the coast "wrecking-tugs" would be on hand to look out for the cargo.

There was therefore no chance for the 'long-shore men to turn an honest penny without working hard for it.

Work and wages enough there would be, to be sure, helping to unload, whenever the sea, now so heavy, should go down a little; but "work" and "wages" were not the precise things some of them were most hungry for.
Two of them, at all events,--one a tall, grizzled, weather-beaten, stoop-shouldered old man, in tattered raiment, and the other more battered still, but with no "look of the sea" about him,--stood on a sand-drift, gloomily gazing at the group of shipwrecked people on the shore, and the helpless mass of timber and spars out there among the beatings of the surf.
"Not more'n three hunder' yards out She'd break up soon, 'f there was no one to hender.

Wot a show we'd hev!" "I reckon," growled the shorter man.