_In Which We See a Ship Sailing in the Sky_
I had forgotten my own peril. Indeed, so disturbed was I for the moment
for my chum’s safety that I cared nothing for the lost sail. I yelled
for Thank at the top of my voice, though doubtless the shrieking of
the wind drowned all sound of my cries. And Thank, for all I knew, was
already far to leeward, fighting in that tempestuous sea.
And then suddenly, through a rift in the flying spray that stung my
face so cruelly and almost blinded me, I beheld something swinging from
the ropes on which I stood. The ship was almost on her beam-ends and
the waves broke just below me. There Thank hung by his foot, which had
twisted in the ropes and was held firm, his head and shoulders buried
in the foaming sea at every plunge of the laboring Gullwing!
I shrieked again and, clinging with one hand with a desperate grip, I
sought to seize him as he swung, pendulum-like, to and fro. _I could
not reach him._
But now the brave ship was righting herself. We rose higher and higher
from the leaping waves. Thank swung back and forth and, as we came
inboard, I feared he would batter his poor brains out against the wire
cables, or against some spar.
He was unconscious. He was helpless. And it seemed as though I was
helpless as well. Those few momentous seconds showed me plainly how
deeply I loved the youth who had been my comrade in adventure and labor
and peril during these last few months. I had never had a chum before
of my own age--not one whom I had really cottoned to. Thank was as dear
to me as a brother would have been.
As we rose higher and higher another fear smote me. If his foot
loosened now and he fell, he would be dashed to death upon the deck
below. In my struggles my hand found a loose rope. I hauled it in
quickly, hung to the spar by my elbows while I formed a noose in the
end, and was unsuccessfully trying to get this over Thank’s head and
shoulders when another man sprang to the footrope beside me.
“Git down there and grab him!” yelled this individual in my ear. “I’ll
hold you both.”
It was Bob Promise and although he was the man aboard whom I least
liked, he was an angel of mercy to me just then. I knew his muscle and
vigor. With one hand he clung to the rope and seized my belt with his
other paw. I knew that belt would hold, and I swung myself, without
question, head-downward.
It was only for a moment that he had to be under the strain of all my
weight and Thank’s as well. Then I had scrambled back to the footrope,
and held my chum in the hollow of my arm. Thank was half drowned,
but his eyes opened and he gasped out something or other before Bob
steadied us both again upon the footrope. Later I realized that he
tried to say, in his cheerful way: “That’s all right, Sharp!”
Between us Bob and I managed to get him down to the deck. We should not
have been able to do that without a sling had the squall not passed
away and left the old Gullwing once more on a comparatively level keel.
When we landed upon the deck boards, Thank managed to stand erect. And
we three shook hands with a sort of grim satisfaction. I don’t think
any of us ever spoke of the event thereafter, and our mates had not
seen our peril, but we three were not likely to forget it.
The old man was still careening around the quarter, like a hen on a hot
skillet, fussing about the lost sails. And scarcely had the squall
passed when he was ordering up new ones to replace those that had been
lost. We went to work bending on the fresh sails while it was yet
blowing so hard that most captains would have kept their crews out of
the rigging.
I began to see that Tom Thornton had not been joking when he said that
the men were paying the penalty for the skipper’s betting an apple
with Captain Si Somes, of the Seamew. Had it been a thousand dollars
at stake, Captain Bowditch would have been no more earnest in his
determination to beat the Gullwing’s sister ship.
But the wind was little more than a stiff gale when the new sails were
set and the ripping repaired. We drove along until night and then the
air became very light. During the night a fog began to gather and when
our watch was called at eight bells in the morning it was pretty thick.
“Looks like a Cape Horn soup,” growled old Tom, as he stepped on deck.
“Though we’re a good bit of a ways from that latitude yet.”
As we stumbled around the deck, doing that everlasting cleaning up
that Mr. Barney watched so sharply, the fog began to thin and waver.
Somewhere overhead there was a breeze; but it was pretty near a dead
calm down here on the deck of the Gullwing.
By the time the sun began to glow upon the edge of the sea, looking
like a great argand lamp in the fog; overhead the billows of mist were
rolling in imitation of the long, swinging swell of the sea itself.
At first those billows in the sky glowed in purple, and rose hues,
ever changing, magnificently beautiful! It was a seascape long to be
remembered.
The sun rose higher. Its rays shot through the rolling mist like
arrows. Now and then the breeze breathed on our sails and the Gullwing
forged ahead at a better pace. The fog left us. We were sailing in an
open space, it seemed, with the mist bank encircling us at a distance
on a few cable-lengths, and the billows still rolling high above the
points of our masts.
And then, to the westward, the curtains rolled back as it seemed for
the scene that had been set for us. Like the stage of a great theatre,
this setting of cloud and mist and heaving sea appeared, and there,
sailing with her keel in the clouds, and her tapering masts and shaking
sails pointing seaward, was a beautiful, misty, four-stick schooner.
“What do you know about that?” demanded Thankful Polk. “Do you see what
I see, Sharp, or have I ‘got ’em?’ That ship’s upside down.”
“It’s a mirage,” I murmured.
“It’s a Jim Hickey of a sight, whatever the right name of it is,” he
rejoined.
Everybody else on deck was aware of the mirage, and a chorus of
exclamations arose from the watch.
“It’s the Gullwing herself!” ejaculated Bob Promise. “Of course it is!
It’s a four-sticker.”
“How do you make that out?” demanded Thank. “I know derned well _I_
ain’t standing on my head, whatever you be.”
“It’s her reflection, sawney!” said somebody else.
“Oh! well I reckoned that I knew whether I was on my head, or my
heels,” chuckled the boy from Georgia.
But I had been watching the mirage very sharply. I knew just what sails
were set upon the Gullwing, and I counted those upon the ship in the
sky. Misty as the reflection was I could distinguish them plainly. And
suddenly I saw a movement among those sails. _Sharply defined figures
of men swarmed into her rigging._
“That’s not the Gullwing at all!” I shouted.
“That boy’s right,” said Mr. Barney sharply, coming out of the
afterhouse with his glass, and with the captain right behind him.
“You’ve got good eyes on you, Webb.”
“By jinks! It’s the Seamew!” roared our skipper, the moment he set his
eyes upon the mirage. “And if she’s sailing that way, she’ll never beat
us to the Capes of Virginia.”
A roar of laughter greeted this joke. But the ship in the sky began
immediately to fade away, and it had soon disappeared, while the wind
freshened with us and we forged ahead still faster. When the fog
completely disappeared there was not a sail in sight anywhere on that
sea, although Mr. Barney went into the tops himself and searched the
horizon with a glass.
But I know that they made a note of the appearance on the log. Some of
the sailors thought the Seamew couldn’t be far from us, either head
or astern; but I knew that the mirage might have reflected our sister
ship hundreds of miles away. The incident gave us a deal to talk about,
however, and an added savor to the race we were sailing half around the
globe.