No stars showed that night, nor was the sun visible next day. A stuffy,
sticky calm obtained, broken by big wind-squalls and heavy downpours.
From fear of working too far to windward, the Uncle Toby was hove to,
and four days and nights of cloud-hidden sky followed. Never did the sun
appear, and on the several occasions that stars broke through they were
too dim and fleeting for identification. By this time it was patent to
the veriest tyro that the elements were preparing to break loose. Grief,
coming on deck from consulting the barometer, which steadfastly remained
at 29.90, encountered Jackie-Jackie, whose face was as brooding
and troublous as the sky and air. Jackie-Jackie, a Tongan sailor of
experience, served as a sort of bosun and semi-second mate over the
mixed Kanaka crew.
“Big weather he come, I think,” he said. “I see him just the same before
maybe five, six times.”
Grief nodded. “Hurricane weather, all right, Jackie-Jackie. Pretty soon
barometer go down--bottom fall out.”
“Sure,” the Tongan concurred. “He goin' to blow like hell.”
Ten minutes later Snow came on deck.
“She's started,” he said; “29.85, going down and pumping at the same
time. It's stinking hot--don't you notice it?” He brushed his forehead
with his hands. “It's sickening. I could lose my breakfast without
trying.”
Jackie-Jackie grinned. “Just the same me. Everything inside walk about.
Always this way before big blow. But _Uncle Toby_ all right. He go
through anything.”
“Better rig that storm-trysail on the main, and a storm-jib,” Grief said
to the mate. “And put all the reefs into the working canvas before you
furl down. No telling what we may need. Put on double gaskets while
you're about it.”
In another hour, the sultry oppressiveness steadily increasing and the
stark calm still continuing, the barometer had fallen to 29.70. The
mate, being young, lacked the patience of waiting for the portentous. He
ceased his restless pacing, and waved his arms.
“If she's going to come let her come!” he cried. “There's no use
shilly-shallying this way! Whatever the worst is, let us know it and
have it! A pretty pickle--lost with a crazy chronometer and a hurricane
that won't blow!”
The cloud-mussed sky turned to a vague copper colour, and seemed to
glow as the inside of a huge heated caldron. Nobody remained below. The
native sailors formed in anxious groups amidships and for'ard, where
they talked in low voices and gazed apprehensively at the ominous
sky and the equally ominous sea that breathed in long, low, oily
undulations.
“Looks like petroleum mixed with castor oil,” the mate grumbled, as he
spat his disgust overside. “My mother used to dose me with messes like
that when I was a kid. Lord, she's getting black!”
The lurid coppery glow had vanished, and the sky thickened and lowered
until the darkness was as that of a late twilight. David Grief, who
well knew the hurricane rules, nevertheless reread the “Laws of Storms,”
screwing his eyes in the faint light in order to see the print. There
was nothing to be done save wait for the wind, so that he might know
how he lay in relation to the fast-flying and deadly centre that from
somewhere was approaching out of the gloom.
It was three in the afternoon, and the glass had sunk to 29:45, when
the wind came. They could see it on the water, darkening the face of the
sea, crisping tiny whitecaps as it rushed along. It was merely a stiff
breeze, and the _Uncle Toby_, filling away under her storm canvas till
the wind was abeam, sloshed along at a four-knot gait.
“No weight to that,” Snow sneered. “And after such grand preparation!”
“Pickaninny wind,” Jackie-Jackie agreed. “He grow big man pretty quick,
you see.”
Grief ordered the foresail put on, retaining the reefs, and the _Uncle
Toby_ mended her pace in the rising breeze. The wind quickly grew to
man's size, but did not stop there. It merely blew hard, and harder, and
kept on blowing harder, advertising each increase by lulls followed by
fierce, freshening gusts. Ever it grew, until the _Uncle Toby's_ rail
was more often pressed under than not, while her waist boiled with
foaming water which the scuppers could not carry off. Grief studied the
barometer, still steadily falling.
“The centre is to the southward,” he told Snow, “and we're running
across its path and into it. Now we'll turn about and run the other way.
That ought to bring the glass up. Take in the foresail--it's more than
she can carry already--and stand by to wear her around.”
The maneuver was accomplished, and through the gloom that was almost
that of the first darkness of evening the _Uncle Toby_ turned and raced
madly north across the face of the storm.
“It's nip and tuck,” Grief confided to the mate a couple of hours
later. “The storm's swinging a big curve--there's no calculating that
curve--and we may win across or the centre may catch us. Thank the Lord,
the glass is holding its own. It all depends on how big the curve is.
The sea's too big for us to keep on. Heave her to! She'll keep working
along out anyway.”
“I thought I knew what wind was,” Snow shouted in his owner's ear next
morning. “This isn't wind. It's something unthinkable. It's impossible.
It must reach ninety or a hundred miles an hour in the gusts. That don't
mean anything. How could I ever tell it to anybody? I couldn't. And look
at that sea! I've run my Easting down, but I never saw anything like
that.”
Day had come, and the sun should have been up an hour, yet the best
it could produce was a sombre semi-twilight. The ocean was a stately
procession of moving mountains. A third of a mile across yawned the
valleys between the great waves. Their long slopes, shielded somewhat
from the full fury of the wind, were broken by systems of smaller
whitecapping waves, but from the high crests of the big waves themselves
the wind tore the whitecaps in the forming. This spume drove masthead
high, and higher, horizontally, above the surface of the sea.
“We're through the worst,” was Grief's judgment. “The glass is coming
along all the time. The sea will get bigger as the wind eases down. I'm
going to turn in. Watch for shifts in the wind. They'll be sure to come.
Call me at eight bells.”
By mid-afternoon, in a huge sea, with the wind after its last shift no
more than a stiff breeze, the Tongan bosun sighted a schooner bottom
up. The _Uncle Toby's_ drift took them across the bow and they could
not make out the name; but before night they picked up with a small,
round-bottom, double-ender boat, swamped but with white lettering
visible on its bow. Through the binoculars, Gray made out: _Emily L No.
3_.
“A sealing schooner,” Grief said. “But what a sealer's doing in these
waters is beyond me.”
“Treasure-hunters, maybe?” Snow speculated. “The _Sophie Sutherland_ and
the _Herman_ were sealers, you remember, chartered out of San Francisco
by the chaps with the maps who can always go right to the spot until
they get there and don't.”