sympathy for her; their troubled affairs of the heart were in similar
plight. He felt an impulse to say something to console her and knew that
he would welcome understanding and consolation from her; promptly he was
afraid of his own tongue, and set curb upon all speech.
“A man never knows how far he may go in making fool talk when he gets
started,” he reflected. “Feeling the way I do to-night, I'd better keep
the conversation kedge well hooked.”
Now that her hands were busy, she did not find the silence embarrassing.
Mayo returned to his ugly meditations.
After a time he was obliged to shift himself on the transom. The
schooner was heeling in a manner which showed the thrust of wind. He
glanced up and saw that the rain was smearing broad splashes on the
dingy glass of the windows. The companion hatch was open, and when he
cocked his ear, with mariner's interest in weather, he heard the wind
gasping in the open space with a queer “guffle” in its tone.
Instinctively he began to look about the cabin for a barometer.
Already that day the _Olenia's_ glass had warned him by its downward
tendency. He wondered whether further reading would indicate something
more ominous than fog.
Across the cabin he noted some sort of an instrument swinging from a
hook on a carline. He investigated. It was a makeshift barometer, the
advertising gift of a yeast company. The contents of its tube were
roiled to the height of the mark which was lettered “Tornado.”
“You can't tell nothing from that!” Captain Candage had come down into
the cabin and stood behind his involuntary guest. “It has registered
'Tornado' ever since the glass got cracked. And even at that, it's about
as reliable as any of the rest of them tinkerdiddle things.”
“Haven't you a regular barometer--an aneroid?” inquired Captain Mayo.
“I can smell all the weather I need to without bothering with one of
them contrivances,” declared the master of the schooner, in lordly
manner. He began to pull dirty oilskins out of a locker.
Mayo hurried up the companionway and put out his head. There were both
weight and menace in the wind which hooted past his ears. The fog was
gone, but the night was black, without glimmer of stars. The white
crests of the waves which galloped alongside flaked the darkness with
ominous signalings.
“If you can smell weather, Captain Candage, your nose ought to tell you
that this promises to be something pretty nasty.”
“Oh, it might be called nasty by lubbers on a gingerbread yacht, but
I have sailed the seas in my day and season, and I don't run for an
inshore puddle every time the wind whickers a little.” He was fumbling
with a button under his crisp roll of chin beard and gave the other man
a stare of superiority.
“You don't class me with yacht-lubbers, do you?”
“Well, you was just on a yacht, wasn't you?”
“Look here, Captain Candage, you may just as well understand, now and
here, that I'm one of your kind of sailors. Excuse me for personal
talk, but I want to inform you that from fifteen to twenty I was a
Grand-Banksman. Last season I was captain of the beam trawler _Laura and
Marion_. And I have steamboated in the Sound and have been a first mate
in the hard-pine trade in Southern waters. I have had a chance to find
out more or less about weather.”
“Un-huh!” remarked the skipper, feigning indifference. “What about it?”
“I tell you that you have no business running out into this mess that is
making from east'ard.”
“If you have been so much and so mighty in your time, then you
understand that a captain takes orders from nobody when he's on board
his own vessel.”
“I understand perfectly well, sir. I'm not giving orders. But my own
life is worth something to me and I have a right to tell you that you
are taking foolhardy chances. And you know it, too!”
Captain Candage's gaze shifted. He was a coaster and he was naturally
cautious, as Apple-treers are obliged to be. He knew perfectly well that
he was in the presence of a man who knew! He had not the assurance to
dispute that man, though his general grudge against all the world at
that moment prompted him.
“I got out because they drove me out,” he growled.
“A man can't afford to be childish when he is in command of a vessel,
sir. You are too old a skipper to deny that.”
“I was so mad I didn't stop to smell weather,” admitted the master,
bracing himself to meet a fresh list of the heeling _Polly_. He
evidently felt that he ought to defend his own sagacity and absolve
himself from mariner's culpability.
“Very well! Let it go at that! But what are you going to do?”
“I can't beat back to Saturday Cove against this wind--not now! She
would rack her blamed old butts out.”
“Then run her for Lumbo Reach. You can quarter a following sea. She
ought to ride fairly easy.”
“That's a narrow stab in a night as black as this one is.”
“I'll make a cross-bearing for you. Where's your chart?” Mayo exhibited
a sailor's alert anxiety to be helpful.
“I 'ain't ever needed a chart--not for this coast.”
“Then I'll have to guess at it, sir.” He closed his eyes in order to
concentrate. “You gave a course of sou'west by sou'. Let's see--it was
nine-fifteen when I just looked and we must have logged--”
“It ain't no use to stab for such a hole in the wall as Lumbo Reach,”
declared Candage in discouraged tones.
“But you've got your compass and I can--”
“There ain't no depending on my compass within two points and a half.”
“Confound it, I can make allowance, sir, if you'll tell me your
deviation!”
“But it's a card compass and spins so bad in a seaway there ain't no
telling, anyway. In my coasting I haven't had to be particular.”
“Not as long as you had an apple-tree in sight,” jeered Mayo, beginning
to lose his temper.
“I don't dare to run in the direction of anything that is solid--we'll
hit it sure, 'n' hell-fire will toast corn bread. We've got to stay to
sea!”
Captain Mayo set his teeth and clenched his fists and took a few turns
up and down the cabin. He looked up into the night through the open
hatch of the companion-way. The pale glimmer of the swinging lamp tossed
a mild flare against the blackness and lighted two faces which were
limned against that pall. Both Oakum Otie and Smut-nosed Dolph were at
the wheel. Their united strength was needed because the schooner was
yawing madly every now and then when the mightier surges of the frothing
sea hoisted her counter, chasing behind her like wild horses. Those
faces, when Mayo looked on them, were very solemn. The two were
crouching like men who were anxious to hide from a savage beast. They
grunted as they struggled with the wheel, trying to hold her up when the
_Polly_ tobogganed with rushes that were almost breath-checking.
Mayo hastened to the girl. “I must have my coat, Miss Candage. I thank
you. It will do now.”
She held it open for his arms, as a maid might aid her knight with his
armor. “Are we in danger?” she asked, tremulously.
“I hope not--only it is uncomfortable--and needless,” he said, with some
irritation.
“Must I stay down here--alone?”
“I would! It's only a summer blow, Miss Candage. I'm sure we'll be all
right.”
Captain Candage had gone on deck, rattling away in his stiff oilskins.
Mayo followed, but the master came down a few steps into the
companionway and intercepted the volunteer, showing a final smolder of
his surliness.
“I want to notify you that I can run my own bo't, sir!”
“Yes, run it with a yeast barometer, a straw bottom, a pinwheel compass,
and your general cussedness of disposition,” shouted Mayo into the whirl
of the wind, his anxiety whetting his much-tried temper.
“If you're feeling that way, I don't want you up here.”
“I'm feeling worse than you'll ever understand, you stubborn old fool!”
“I let one man call me a fool to-day and I didn't make back talk--but I
know where to draw the line,” warned Candage.
“Look here, I propose to start in with you right now, sir, on a basis
you'll understand! I say you're a fool and need a guardian--and from now
on I'm going to make my bigness aboard here! Get out of my way!”
Captain Mayo then emphasized his opinion of Captain Candage by elbowing
the master to one side and leaping out on deck.
“That may be mutiny,” stated Mr. Speed through set teeth, checking the
startled exclamation from his helper at the wheel. “But, by the Judas
I-scarrot, it's a Mayo that's doing it! Remember that, Dolph!”
VIII ~ LIKE BUGS UNDER A THIMBLE
Up comes the skipper from down below,
And he looks aloft and he looks alow.
And he looks alow and he looks aloft,
And it's, “Coil up your ropes, there, fore and aft.”
With a big Bow-wow!
Tow-row-row!
Fal de rai de, ri do day!
--Boston Shanty.
Captain Mayo strode straight to the men at the wheel. “Give me those
spokes!” he commanded. “I'll take her! Get in your washing, boys!”
“Ay, ay, sir!” assented Mr. Speed, giving the resisting Dolph a violent
shove.
When Captain Candage began to curse, Captain Mayo showed that he had a
voice and vocabulary of his own. He fairly roared down the master of the
_Polly_.
“Now shut up!” he ordered the dumfounded skipper, who faced him, mouth
agape. “This is no time for any more foolishness. It's a case of work
together to save our lives. Down with 'em, boys!”
“That's right,” declared the mate. “She don't need much of anything on
her except a double-reefed mitten with the thumb brailed up.”
The wind had not attained the velocity of a gale, but it did have an
ugly growl which suggested further violence. Mayo braced himself, ready
to bring the schooner about in order to give the crew an opportunity to
shorten sail.
Captain Candage, deposed as autocrat for the moment, seemed to be
uncertain as to his duties.
Mayo, understanding mariner nature, felt some contrition and was
prompted by saner second thought.
“You'd better take the wheel, Captain Candage. You know her tricks
better than I do in a seaway. I'll help the boys take in sail.”
The master obeyed with alacrity. He seemed to be cowed. Anger no longer
blinded him to their predicament.
“Just say what you want done, and I'll try to do it,” he told Mayo, in
a voice which had become suddenly mild and rather beseeching. Then he
called to his daughter, who had come to the foot of the companion steps,
“Better blow out that cabin light, Polly girl! She's li'ble to dance
bad, and we don't want to run the chance of fire.”
Mayo got a glimpse at her face as he hurried upon the house on his way
to the main halyards. Her face was pale, but there was the firm spirit
of her Yankee ancestry of the sea in her poise and in her very silence
in that crisis. She obeyed without complaint or question and the cabin
was dark; even the glimmer of the light had held something of cheer. Now
the gloom was somber and depressing.
The schooner came round with a sort of scared hurry when the master
threw the wheel hard over and trod on the spokes with all his weight. As
soon as the bellying mainsail began to flap, the three men let it go on
the run. They kept up the jumbo sail, as the main jib is called; they
reefed the foresail down to its smallest compass.
Mayo, young, nimble, and eager, singly knotted more reef points
than both his helpers together, and his crisp commands were obeyed
unquestioningly.
“He sartinly is chain lightning in pants,” confided Dolph to Otie.
“He knows his card,” said Otie to Dolph.
Captain Mayo led the way aft, crawling over the shingles and laths.
“I hope it's your judgment, sir, that we'd better keep her into the wind
as she is and try to ride this thing out,” he suggested to the master.
“It is my judgment, sir,” returned Captain Candage, with official
gravity.
Hove to, the old _Polly_ rode in fairly comfortable style. She was deep
with her load of lumber, but the lumber made her buoyant and she
lifted easily. Her breadth of beam helped to steady her in the sweeping
seas--but Captain Mayo clung to a mainstay and faced the wind and
the driving rain and knew that the open Atlantic was no place for the
_Polly_ on a night like that.
Spume from the crested breakers at her wallowing bow salted the rain on
his dripping face. It was an unseasonable tempest, scarcely to be looked
for at that time of year. But he had had frequent experience with the
vagaries of easterlies, and he knew that a summer easterly, when it
comes, holds menacing possibilities.
“They knowed how to build schooners when your old sirs built this one at
Mayoport,” declared Captain Candage, trying to put a conciliatory tone
into his voice when he bellowed against the blast. “She'll live where
one of these fancy yachts of twice her size would be smothered.”
Mayo did not answer. He leaped upon the house and helped Dolph and Otie
furl the mainsail that lay sprawled in the lazy-jaeks. They took their
time; the more imminent danger seemed to be over.
“I never knowed a summer blow to amount to much,” observed Mr. Speed,
trying to perk up, though he was hanging on by both hands to avoid bring
blown off the slippery house.
“It depends on whether there's an extra special squall knotted into it
somewhere to windward,” said Mayo, in a lull of the wind. “Then it can
amount to a devil of a lot, Mr. Speed!”
The schooner washed her nose in a curving billow that came inboard
and swept aft. With her small area of exposed sail and with the wind
buffeting her, she had halted and paid off, lacking steerageway. She got
several wallops of the same sort before she had gathered herself enough
to head into the wind.
Again she paid off, as if trying to avoid a volleying gust, and another
wave crested itself ahead of the blunt bows and then seemed to explode,
dropping tons of water on deck. Laths, lumber, and bunches of shingles
were ripped loose and went into the sea. The _Polly_ appeared to be
showing sagacity of her own in that crisis; she was jettisoning cargo
for her own salvation.
“Good Cephas! this is going to lose us our decklo'd,” wailed the master.
“We'd better let her run!” “Don't you do it, sir! You'll never get her
about!” Mayo had given over his work on the sail and was listening.
Above the scream of the passing gusts which assailed him he was hearing
a dull and solemn roar to windward. He suspected what that sound
indicated. He had heard it before in his experience. He tried to
peer into the driving storm, dragging the rain from his eyes with his
fingers. Then nature held a torch for him. A vivid shaft of lightning
crinkled overhead and spread a broad flare of illumination across the
sea. His suspicions, which had been stirred by that sullen roar, were
now verified. He saw a low wall of white water, rolling and frothing. It
was a summer “spitter” trampling the waves.
A spitter is a freak in a regular tempest--a midsummer madness of
weather upheaval. It is a thunderbolt of wind, a concentration of gale,
a whirling dervish of disaster--wind compactly bunched into one almighty
blast--wind enough to last a regular gale for a whole day if the stock
were spent thriftily.
“Don't ease her an inch!” screamed Mayo.
But just then another surging sea climbed aboard and picked up more of
the laths and more of the shingles, and frolicked away into the night
with the plunder. Captain Candage's sense of thrift got a more vital jab
than did his sense of fear. His eyes were on his wheel, and he had not
seen the wall of white spume.
“That decklo'd has got to be lashed,” he muttered. He decided to run
with the wind till that work could be performed. He threw his helm hard
over. Mayo had been riding the main boom astraddle, hitching himself
toward the captain, to make him hear. When the volunteer saw the master
of the _Polly_ trying to turn tail to the foe in that fashion, he leaped
to the wheel, but he was too late. The schooner had paid off too much.
The yelling spitter caught them as they were poised broadside on the top
of a wave, before the sluggish craft had made her full turn.
What happened then might have served as confirmation of mariners'
superstition that a veritable demon reigns in the heart of the tempest.
The attack on the old _Polly_ showed devilish intelligence in team-work.
A crashing curler took advantage of the loosened deckload and smashed
the schooner a longside buffet which sent all the lumber in a sliding
drive against the lee rail and rigging. The mainsail had been only
partly secured; the spitter blew into the flapping canvas with all its
force and the sail snapped free and bellied out.
The next instant the _Polly_ was tripped!
She went over with all the helpless, dead-weight violence of a man who
has caught his toe on a drooping clothes line in the dark.
The four men who were on deck were sailors and they did not need
orders when they felt that soul-sickening swing of her as she toppled.
Instinctively, with one accord, they dived for the cabin companionway.
Undoubtedly, as a sailor, the first thought of each was that the
schooner was going on to her beam-ends. Therefore, to remain on deck
meant that they would either slide into the water or that a smashing
wave would carry them off.
They went tumbling down together in the darkness, and all four of
them, with impulse of preservation as instant and true as that of the
trap-door spider, set their hands to the closing of the hatch and the
folding leaves of the door.
Captain Mayo, his clutch still on a knob, found himself pulled under
water without understanding at first just what had happened. He let go
his grip and came up to the surface, spouting. He heard the girl shriek
in extremity of terror, so near him that her breath swept his face. He
put out his arm and caught her while he was floundering for a footing.
When he found something on which to stand and had steadied himself, he
could not comprehend just what had happened; the floor he was standing
on had queer irregularities.
“We've gone over!” squalled Mr. Speed in the black darkness. “We've gone
clear over. We're upside down. We're standing on the ceiling!”
Then Mayo trod about a bit and convinced himself that the irregularities
under his feet were the beams and carlines.
The _Polly_ had been tripped in good earnest! Mr. Speed was right--she
was squarely upside down!
Even in that moment of stress Mayo could figure out how it had happened.
The spitter must have ripped all her rotten canvas off her spars as she
rolled and there had been no brace to hold her on her beam-ends when she
went over.
Captain Candage was spouting, splashing near at hand, and was bellowing
his fears. Then he began to call for his daughter in piteous fashion.
“Are you drownded, Polly darling?” he shouted.
“I have her safe, sir,” Mayo assured him in husky tones, trying to clear
the water from his throat. “Stand on a beam. You can get half of your
body above water.”
“It's all off with us,” gasped the master. “We're spoke for.”
Such utter and impenetrable blackness Mayo had never experienced before.
Their voices boomed dully, as if they were in a huge hogshead which had
been headed over.
'“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,'”
quavered the cook. “If anybody knows a better prayer I wish he'd say
it.”
“Plumb over--upside down! Worse off than flies in a puddle of Porty Reek
molasses,” mourned Mr. Speed.
The master joined the mate in lamentation. “I have brought my baby to
this! I have brought my Polly here! God forgive me. Can't you speak to
me, Polly?”
Mayo found the girl very quiet in the hook of his arm, and he put his
free hand against her cheek. She did not move under his touch.
“She has fainted, sir.”
“No, she's dead! She's dead!” Candage began to weep and started to
splash his way across the cabin, directed by Mayo's voice.
“She is all right--she is breathing,” the young man assured the father.
“Here! This way, captain! Take her. Hold her up. I want to see whether
anything can be done for us.”
“Nothing can be done!” whimpered Candage. “We're goners.”
“We're goners,” averred Oakum Otie.
“We're goners,” echoed Dolph.
Mayo gave the girl into the groping arms of her father and stood for a
few moments reflecting on their desperate plight. He was not hopeful. In
his heart he agreed with the convictions which his mates were expressing
in childish falsetto. But being a young sailor who found his head above
water, he resolved to keep on battling in that emergency; the adage
of the coastwise mariner is: “Don't die till Davy Jones sets his final
pinch on your weasen!”
First of all, he gave full consideration to what had happened. The
_Polly_ had been whipped over so quickly that she had been transformed
into a sort of diving-bell.{*} That is to say, a considerable amount of
air had been captured and was now retained in her. It was compressed
by the water which was forced up from below through the windows and
the shattered skylight. The pressure on Mayo's temples afforded him
information on this point. The _Polly_ was floating, and he felt
comforting confidence that she would continue to float for some
time. But this prospect did not insure safety or promise life to the
unfortunates who had been trapped in her bowels. The air must either
escape gradually or become vitiated as they breathed it.
* The strange adventure of the _Polly_ is not an
improbability of fiction. A Bath, Maine, schooner, lumber-
laden, was tripped in exactly this fashion off Hatteras.
Captain Boyd Mayo's exploit has been paralleled in real life
in all details. My good friend Captain Elliott C. Gardner,
former skipper of the world's only seven-master, the _Thomas
W. Lawson_, furnished those details to me, and after writing
this part of the tale I submitted the narrative to him for
confirmation. It has received his indorsement.--H. D.
There was only one thing to do, he decided: take advantage of any
period of truce which their ancient enemy, the sea, had allowed in that
desperate battle.
A sailor is prey to hazards and victim of the unexpected in the
ever-changing moods of the ocean; he must needs be master of expedients
and ready grappler of emergencies.
“Where are your tools--a saw--a chisel?” demanded Mayo. He was obliged
to repeat that query several times. His companions appeared to be wholly
absorbed in their personal woes.
At last Mr. Speed checked his groans long enough to state that the tools
were in “the lazareet.”
The lazaret of a coaster is a storeroom under the
quarter-deck--repository of general odds and ends and spare equipment.
“Any way to get at it except through the deck-hatch?”
“There's a door through, back of the companion ladder,” said Mr. Speed,
with listless indifference.
Mayo crowded his way past the ladder after he had waded and stumbled
here and there and had located it. He set his shoulders against the
slope of the steps and pushed at the door with his feet. After he had
forced it open he waded into the storeroom. It was blind business,
hunting for anything in that place. He knew the general habits of the
hit-or-miss coasting crews, and was sure that the tools had been thrown
in among the rest of the clutter by the person who used them last. If
they had been loose on the floor they would now be loose on the ceiling.
He pushed his feet about, hoping to tread on something that felt like a
saw or chisel.
“Ahoy, you men out there!” he called. “Don't you have any idea in what
part of this lazaret the tools were?”
“Oh, they was probably just throwed in,” said Mr. Speed. “I wish you
wouldn't bother me so much! I'm trying to compose my mind to pray.”
There were so much ruck and stuff under his feet that Mayo gave up
searching after a time. He had held his breath and ducked his head under
water so that he might investigate with his bare hands, but he found
nothing which would help him, and his brain was dizzy after his efforts
and his mouth was choked by the dirty water.
But when he groped his way back into the main cabin his hands came in
contact with the inside of the lazaret door. In leather loops on the
door he found saw, ax, chisel, and hammer. He was unable to keep back a
few hearty and soul-satisfying oaths.
“Why didn't you tell me where the tools were? They're here on the door.”
“I had forgot about picking 'em tip. And my mind ain't on tools,
anyway.”
“Your mind will be on 'em as soon as I can get forward there,” growled
the incensed captain.