With his "Haul away now when you're ready," Clancy came down from
aloft. He was sliding down evidently by way of the jib halyards, for
there was the sound of a chafing whiz that could be nothing else than
the friction of oilskins against taut manila rope, a sudden check, as
of a block met on the way, an impatient, soft, little forgivable oath,
and then a plump! that meant that he must have dropped the last twelve
or fifteen feet to the deck. Immediately came the scurry of his
boot-heels as he hurried aft. In another moment he stood in the glow
of the binnacle light, and reaching back toward the shadow of the
cook, but never turning his head from that spot out in the dark where
he had last seen the boat, he took the wheel.
"All right, George, I've got you. A good-sized school, by the looks,
if they got them, and I think they have. Did you see that boat ahead
we near ran into?--the last time we put the wheel down? Man, but for a
second I thought they were gone. I hope no blessed vessel comes as
near to our fellows. And they were so busy rowing and heaving twine
they never saw us, and myself nearly cross-eyed trying to watch them
and our own boat and the fish all the time. Go below, George, she's
all right now, and tell Joe--where is he?--to go below, too, and have
a mug-up for himself. He must be soaked through taking the swash that
must've come over her bow for the last hour. But tell him to come
right up so's to keep watch out ahead."
I didn't go below, however, but standing by the fore-rigging kept an
eye out ahead. Clancy himself stood to the wheel with his head ever
turned over one shoulder, until he saw the flare of a torch from the
seine-boat. "Good!" he exclaimed. "What there is is safe now,
anyway."
After that his work was easy. He had only to dodge the lights of other
vessels now, the old red and green lights that had been our neighbors
all that evening, and a few new yellow flares that came from other
seine-boats. So his eyes ranged the blackness and in rings about his
own seine-boat he sailed the Johnnie Duncan. That the crew were quite
a little while pursing up only gave him satisfaction. "A nice school,
Joe, if they got it all," he said, "a nice school of 'em." And after a
pause, "I think I'll stand down and have a look."