therefore he took all the tools, holding them above water. When he waded
past Captain Can-dage he heard the old skipper trying to comfort the
girl, his voice low and broken by sobs. She had recovered consciousness
and Mayo was a bit sorry; in her swoon she had not realized their
plight; he feared hysterics and other feminine demonstrations, and he
knew that he needed all his nerve.
“We're going to die--we're going to die!” the girl kept moaning.
“Yes, my poor baby, and I have brought you to it,” blubbered her father.
“Please keep up your courage for a little while, Miss Candage,” Mayo
pleaded, wistfully.
“But there's no hope!”
“There's hope just as long as we have a little air and a little grit,”
he insisted. “Now, please!”
“I am afraid!” she whispered.
“So am I,” he confessed. “But we're all going to work the best we know
how. Can't you encourage us like a brave, good girl?” He went stumbling
on. “Now tell me, mate,” he commanded, briskly, “how thick is the
bulkhead between the cabin, here, and the hold?”
“I can't bother to think,” returned Mr. Speed.
“It's only sheathing between the beams, sir,” stated Captain Candage.
“Mate, you and the cook lend a hand to help me.”
Oakum Otie broke off the prayer to which he had returned promptly.
“What's the use?” he demanded, with anger which his fright made
juvenile. “I tell you I'm trying to compose my soul, and I want this
rampage-round stopped.”
“I say what's the use, too!” whined Dolph. “You can't row a biskit
across a puddle of molasses with a couple of toothpicks,” he added, with
cook's metaphor for the absolutely hopeless.
Mayo shouted at them with a violence that made hideous din in that
narrow space. “You two men wade across here to me or I'll come after
you with an ax in one hand and a hammer in the other! Damn you, I mean
business!”
They were silent, then there sounded the splash of water and they came,
muttering. They had recognized the ring of desperate resolve in his
command.
Mayo, when he heard their stertorous breathing close at hand, groped
for them and shoved tools into their clutch. He retained the hammer and
chisel for himself.
“That's about all I need you for just now--for tool-racks,” he growled.
“Make sure you don't drop those.”
The upturned schooner rolled sluggishly, and every now and then the
water swashed across her cabin with extra impetus, making footing
insecure.
“If I tumble down I'll have to drop 'em,” whimpered Oolph.
“Then don't come up. Drowning will be an easier death for you,” declared
the captain, menacingly. He was sounding the bulkhead with his hammer.
The tapping quickly showed him where the upright beams were located on
the other side of the sheathing. In his own mind he was not as sanguine
as his activity might have indicated. It was blind experiment--he
could not estimate the obstacles which were ahead of him. But he did
understand, well enough, that if they were to escape they must do so
through the bottom of the vessel amidship; there, wallowing though she
was, there might be some freeboard. He had seen vessels floating bottom
up. Usually a section of the keel and a portion of the garboard streaks
were in sight above the sea. But there could be no escape through the
bottom of the craft above them where they stood in the cabin. He knew
that the counter and buttock must be well under water.
“Have you a full cargo belowdecks?” he asked.
“No,” stated Captain Candage, hinting by his tone that he wondered what
difference that would make to them in the straits in which they were
placed.
Mayo felt a bit of fresh courage. He had been afraid that the _Polly's_
hold would be found to be stuffed full of lumber. His rising spirits
prompted a little sarcasm.
“How did it ever happen that you didn't plug the trap you set for us?”
“Couldn't get but two-thirds cargo below because the lumber was sawed so
long. Made it up by extra deck-lo'd.”
“Yes, piled it all on deck so as to make her top-heavy--so as to be sure
of catching us,” suggested Mayo, beginning to work his hammer and chisel
on the sheathing.
“'Tain't no such thing!” expostulated Captain Candage, missing the
irony. “Them shingles and laths is packet freight, and I couldn't put
'em below because I've got to deliver 'em this side of New York. And you
don't expect me to overhaul a whole decklo'd so as to--”
“Not now,” broke in Mayo. “The Atlantic Ocean has attended to the case
of that deckload.”
“My Gawd, yes!” mourned the master. “I was forgetting that we are upside
down--and that shows what a state of mind I'm in!”
Mayo had picked his spot for operations. He drove his chisel through the
sheathing as close to the cabin floor as he could. Remembering that
the schooner was upside down and that the floor was over his head, the
aperture he was starting work on would bring him nearest the bilge. When
he had chiseled a hole big enough for a start, he secured the saw from
the mate and sawed a square opening. He lifted himself up and worked his
way through the hole and found himself on lumber and out of water.
It was what he had been hoping to find, after the assurance from the
master: the partial cargo of lumber in the hold had settled to the deck
when the schooner tipped over. Investigating with groping hands, he
assured himself that there were fully three feet of space between the
cargo and the bottom of the vessel.
“Come here with your daughter, Captain Candage!” he called, cheerily.
“It's dry in here.”
He kneeled and held his hands out through the opening, directing them
with his voice, reaching into the pitchy darkness until her hands found
his, and then he brought her up to him and in upon the lumber.
“It's a little better, even if it's nothing to brag about,” he told her.
“Sit over there at one side so that the men can crawl in past you. I'll
need them to help me.”
“And what do you think now--shall we die?” she asked, in tremulous
whisper.
“No, I don't think so,” he told her, stoutly.
They were alone in the hold for a few moments while the others were
helping one another through the opening.
“But in this trap--in the dark--crowded in here!” Her tone did not
express doubt; it was pathetic endeavor to understand their plight. “My
father and his men are frightened--they have given up. And you told me
that you are frightened!”
“Yes, I am!”
“But they are not doing anything to help you.”
“Perhaps that is because they are not scared as much as I am. It often
happens that the more frightened a man is in a tight place the more he
jumps around and the harder he tries to get out.”
“I don't care what you say--I know what you are!” she rejoined. “You are
a brave man, Captain Mayo. I thank you!”
“Not yet! Not until--”
“Yes, now! You have set me a good example. When folks are scared they
should not sit down and whimper!”
He reached and found a plump little fist which she had doubled into a
real knob of decision.
“Good work, little girl! Your kind of grit is helping me.” He released
her hand and crawled forward.
“This ain't helping us any,” complained Captain Candage. “I know what's
going to happen to us. As soon as it gets daylight a cussed coast-guard
cutter will come snorting along and blow us up without bothering to find
out what is under this turkle-shell.”
“Say, look here, Candage,” called Captain Mayo, angrily, “that's enough
of that talk! There's a-plenty happening to us as it is, without your
infernal driveling about what _may_ happen.”
“Isn't it about time for a real man to help Captain Mayo instead of
hindering him?” asked the girl. Evidently her new composure startled her
father.
“Ain't you scared any more, Polly? You ain't losing your mind, are you?”
“No, I have it back again, I hope.”
“Your daughter is setting you a good example, Captain Candage. Now let's
get down to business, sir! What's your sheathing on the ribs?”
“Inch and a half spruce, if I remember right.”
“I take it she is ribbed about every twelve inches.”
“Near's I remember.”
“All right! Swarm forward here, the three of you, and have those tools
handy as I need 'em.”
He had brought the hammer and chisel in his reefer pockets, and set at
work on the sheathing over his head, having picked by touch and sense
of locality a section which he considered to be nearly amidship. It
was blind effort, but he managed to knock away a few square feet of the
spruce boarding after a time.
“Hand me that saw, whoever has it.”
A hand came fumbling to his in the dark and gave him the tool. He began
on one of the oak ribs, uncovered when the boarding had been removed.
It was difficult and tedious work, for he could use only the tip of the
saw, because the ribs were so close together. But he toiled on steadily,
and at last the sound of his diligence appeared to animate the others.
When he rested for a moment Captain Candage offered to help with the
sawing.
“I think I'll be obliged to do it alone, sir. You can't tell in the dark
where I have left off. However, I'm glad to see that you're coming back
to your senses,” he added, a bit caustically.
The master of the _Polly_ received that rebuke with a meekness that
indicated a decided change of heart. “I reckon me and Otie and Dolph
have been acting out what you might call pretty pussylaminous, as I
heard a schoolmarm say once,” confessed the skipper, struggling with the
big word. “But we three ain't as young as we was once, and I'll leave it
to you, sir, if this wasn't something that nobody had ever reckoned on.”
“There's considerable novelty in it,” said Mayo, in dry tones, running
his fingers over the rib to find the saw-scarf. The ache had gone out of
his arms, and he was ready to begin again.
“I'm sorry we yanked you into all this trouble,” Can-dage went on. “And
on the other hand, I ain't so sorry! Because if you hadn't been along
with us we'd never have got out of this scrape.”
“We haven't got out of it yet, Captain Candage.”
“Well, we are making an almighty good start, and I want to say here in
the hearing of all interested friends that you're the smartest cuss I
ever saw afloat.”
“I hope you will forgive father,” pleaded Polly of the _Polly_. He felt
her breath on his cheek. She was so near that her voice nearly jumped
him. “I don't mean to get in your way, Captain Mayo, but somehow I feel
safer if I'm close to you.”
“And I guess all of us do,” admitted Captain Candage.
Mayo stopped sawing for a moment. “What say, men? Let's be Yankee
sailors from this time on! We'll be the right sort, eh? We'll put this
brave little girl where she belongs--on God's solid ground!”
“Amen!” boomed Mr. Speed. “I have woke up. I must have been out of my
mind. I showed you my nature when I first met you, Captain Mayo, and I
reckon you found it was helpful and enterprising. I'll be the same from
now on, even if you order me to play goat and try to butt the bottom out
of her with my head.” “Me, too!” said Smut-nosed Dolph.
IX ~ A MAN'S JOB
O Nancy Dawson, hi--o!
Cheer'ly man! She's got a notion, hi--o!
Cheer'ly manl For our old bo'sun, hi--o!
Cheer'ly man! O hauley hi--o!
Cheer'ly man!
--Hauling Song.
Boyd Mayo soon found that his ancestors had put no scrub timber into the
_Polly_. The old oak rib was tough as well as bulky. The task of sawing
with merely the tip of the blade in play required both muscle and
patience, and the position he was obliged to assume added to his
difficulties. He rested after he had sawed the rib in four places, and
decided to give Oakum Otie something to do; the mate had been begging
for an opportunity to grab in. He was ordered to knock away as much as
he could of the sawed section with hammer and chisel. Mayo figured that
when this section of rib had been removed it would leave room for a hole
through the bottom planks at least two feet square--and there were no
swelling girths in their party.
The mate had strength, and he was eager to display that helpful spirit
of which he had boasted. He went at the beam with all his might.
Mayo's attention had been centered on his task; now, with a moment's
leisure in which to note other matters, he was conscious of something
which provoked his apprehension; the air under the hull of the schooner
was becoming vitiated. His temples throbbed and his ears rang.
“Ain't it getting pretty stuffy in here?” asked the master, putting
words to Mayo's thoughts.
“I have been feeling like a bug under a thimble for some little time,”
stated Otie, whacking his chisel sturdily.
“Her bottom can't be awash with all this lumber in her. If we can only
get a little speck of a hole through the outside planking right now,
we'd better do it,” suggested Candage.
“That's just what I have been doing,” declared Mr. Speed. “I'm right
after the job, gents, when I get started on a thing. Helpful and
enterprising, that's my motto!”
The next moment, before Mayo, his thoughts busy with his new danger of
suffocation, could voice warning or had grasped the full import of the
dialogue, the chisel's edge plugged through the planking. Instantly
there was a hiss like escaping steam. Mayo yelled an oath and set his
hands against the mate, pushing him violently away. The industrious Mr.
Speed had been devoting his attention to the planking instead of to the
sawed beam.
Wan light filtered through the crevice made by the chisel and Mayo
planted his palm against the crack. The pressure held his hand as if it
were clamped against the planks, and the hissing ceased.
The schooner, as she lay, upside down in the sea, was practically a
diving-bell; with that hole in her shell their safety was in jeopardy.
The girl seemed to understand the situation before the duller minds of
her father and his mates had begun to work. She frenziedly sought for
Mayo's disengaged hand and thrust some kind of fabric into it.
“It's from my petticoat,” she gasped. “Can you calk with it?”
“Hand me the chisel,” he entreated.
As soon as she had given the tool to him he worked his hand free from
the crack and instantly drove the fabric into the crevice, crowding it
fold by fold with the edge of the chisel.
“Hope I didn't do anything wrong, trying to be helpful,” apologized Mr.
Speed.
“I'll do the rest of this job without any such help,” growled the
captain.
“But what are you stopping the air for when it's rushing in to liven us
up?” asked Dolph, plaintively.
“It was rushing out, fool! Rushing out so fast that this lumber would
have flattened us against the bottom of this hull in a little while.”
“I would have figgered it just t'other way,” stated Mr. Speed, humbly.
“Outside air, being fresh, ought nat'rally to rush in to fill the holes
we have breathed out of this air.”
Mayo was in no mood to lecture on natural phenomena. He investigated the
cut which had been made by the incautious mate and estimated, by what
his fingers told him, that the schooner's bottom planks were three
inches thick. He settled back on his haunches and gave a little thought
to the matter, and understood that he had a ticklish job ahead of him.
Those planks must be gouged around the complete square of the proposed
opening, so that the section might be driven out in one piece by a blow
from beneath. That section must give way wholly and instantly. They were
doomed if they made a half-job of it. In that pitchy blackness he had
only his fingers to guide him. That one little streak of light from the
open world without was tantalizing promise. On the other side of those
planks was God's limitless air. The poor creatures penned under that
hull were gasping and choking for want of that air. Mayo set bravely to
work, hammering at the chisel-head above him.
All were silent. They felt the initial languor of suffocation and knew
the peril which was threatening them.
“If there is anything I can do--” ventured Otie.
“There isn't!”
Captain Mayo felt the lack of oxygen most cruelly, because he was
working with all his might. Perspiration was streaming into his eyes, he
was panting like a running dog, his blows were losing force.
He found that Otie had partly cleared out the rib before that
too-willing helper had taken it into his head to knock a hole through
the planking. The rib must come away entirely! The tough oak resisted;
the chisel slipped; it was maddeningly slow work. But he finished the
task at last and began to gouge a channel in the planking close to the
other ribs. Torpor was wrapping its tentacles about him. He heard his
companions gasping for breath. Then, all at once, he felt a little pat
on his shoulder. He knew that tap for what it was, though she did not
speak to him; it was the girl's reassuring touch. It comforted him to be
told in that manner that she was keeping up her courage in the horrible
situation. He beveled the planks as deeply as he dared, and made his cut
around three sides of his square. He was forced to stop for a moment and
lay prostrate, his face on the lumber.
“Take that saw, one of you, and chunk off a few short lengths of plank,”
he whispered, hoarsely. The rasp of the hand-saw informed him that he
had been obeyed.
He held his eyes wide open with effort as he lay there in the darkness.
Then he struggled up and went at his task once more. Queerly colored
flames were shooting before his straining eyes. He toiled in partial
delirium, and it seemed to him that he was looking again at the
phantasmagoria of the Coston lights on the fog when the yachtsmen were
serenading the girl of the Polly. He found himself muttering, keeping
time to his chisel-blows:
“Our Polly O,
O'er the sea you go--”
In all the human emotions there is no more maddening and soul-flaying
terror than the fear of being shut in, which wise men call
claustrophobia. Mayo had been a man of the open--of wide horizons,
drinking from the fount of all the air under the heavens. This hideous
confinement was demoralizing his reason. He wanted to throw down his
hammer and chisel and scream and kick and throw himself up against the
penning planks. On the other side was air--the open! There was still one
side of the square to do.
Again that comforting little hand touched his shoulder and he was
spurred by the thought that the girl was still courageous and had faith
in him. He groaned and kept on.
Lapse of time ceased to have significance. Every now and then the hammer
slipped and bruised his hand cruelly. But he did not feel the hurt. Both
tools wavered in his grasp. He struck a desperate--a despairing blow and
the hammer and chisel dropped. He knew that he had finished the fourth
side. He fell across Polly Candage's lap and she helped him to his
knees.
“I'm done, men,” he gasped. “All together with those joists! Strike
together! Right above my head.”
He heard the skipper count one--two--three. He heard the concerted blow.
The planks did not give way.
“We don't seem to have no strength left,” explained the mate, in hoarse
tones.
They struck again, but irregularly.
“It's our lives--our lives, men!” cried Mayo. “Ram it to her!”
“Here's one for you, Captain Mayo,” said Candage, and he thrust a length
of plank into the groping hands.
“Make it together, this time--together!” commanded Mayo. “Hard--one,
two, three!”
They drove their battering-rams up against the prisoning roof. Fury and
despair were behind their blow.
The glory of light flooded into their blinking eyes.
The section had given way!
Mayo went first and he snapped out with almost the violence of a cork
popping from a bottle. He felt the rush of the imprisoned air past him
as he emerged. Instantly he turned and thrust down his hands and pulled
the girl up into the open and the others followed, the lumber pushing
under their feet.
It seemed to Captain Mayo, after those few frenzied moments of escape,
that he had awakened from a nightmare; he found himself clinging to the
schooner's barnacled keel, his arm holding Polly Candage from sliding
down over the slimy bottom into the sea.
“Good jeero! We've been in there all night,” bawled Captain Candage. He
lay sprawled on the bottom of the Polly, his hornbeam hands clutching
the keel, his face upraised wonderingly to the skies that were flooded
with the glory of the morning. Otie and Dolph were beside him, mouths
open, gulping in draughts of the air as if they were fish freshly drawn
from the ocean depths.
There was a long silence after the skipper's ejaculation.
Thoughts, rather than words, fitted that sacred moment of their
salvation.
The five persons who lay there on the bottom of the schooner stared at
the sun in its cloudless sky and gazed off across the sea whose blue was
shrouded by the golden haze of a perfect summer's day. Only a lazy roll
was left of the sudden turbulence of the night before. A listless breeze
with a fresh tang of salt in it lapped the surface of the long,
slow surges, and the facets of the ripples flashed back the sunlight
cheerily.
Captain Candage pulled himself to the keel, sat upon it, and found
speech in faltering manner.
“I ain't a member of no church, never having felt the need of j'ining,
and not being handy where I could tend out. But I ain't ashamed to say
here, before witnesses, that I have just been telling God, as best I
know how, hoping He'll excuse me if I 'ain't used the sanctimonious way,
that I'm going to be a different man after this--different and better,
according to my best lights.”
“I believe you have spoken for all of us, Captain Can-dage,” said Mayo,
earnestly. “I thank you!”
They all perceived that the _Polly_ had made offing at a lively pace
during her wild gallop under the impetus of the easterly.
Mayo balanced himself on the keel and took a long survey of the horizon.
In one place a thread of blue, almost as delicate as the tracery of a
vein on a girl's arm, suggested shore line. But without a glass he was
not sure. He saw no sign of any other craft; the storm had driven all
coasters to harbor--and there was not wind enough as yet to help them
out to sea again. But he did not worry; he was sure that something,
some yacht or sea-wagon, would come rolling up over the rim of the ocean
before long. The faint breeze which fanned their faces was from the
southwest, and that fact promised wind enough to invite shipping to
spread canvas.
Only the oval of the schooner's broad bilge showed above water, and the
old Polly was so flat and tubby that their floating islet afforded only
scant freeboard.
Mayo shoved his arm down into the hole through which they had escaped.
After the air had been forced out the lumber was within reach from the
schooner's bottom. He fumbled about and found the ax. Some of the short
bits of lumber which they had used as battering-rams were in the jaws
of the hole. He busied himself with hewing these ends of planks into big
wedges and he drove them into cracks between the planks near the keel.
“It may come to be a bit sloppy when this sou'wester gets its gait on,”
he suggested to the skipper. “We'll have something to hang on to.”
Captain Candage's first thankfulness had shown a radiant gloss. But
he was a sailorman, he was cautious, he was naturally apprehensive
regarding all matters of the sea, and that gloss was now dulled a bit by
his second thought.
“We may have to hang on to something longer 'n we reckon on. We're too
far off for the coasters and too far in for the big fellers. And unless
something comes pretty clost to us we can't be seen no more 'n as if we
was mussels on a tide reef. We'd ought to have something to stick up.”
“If we could only work out one of those long joists it would make a
little show.” Captain Mayo shoved his arm down the hole again. “But they
are wedged across too solidly.”
“I think there's a piece of lumber floating over there,” cried the girl.
She was clinging to one of the wedges, and the composure which she felt,
or had assumed, stirred Mayo's admiration. The plump hand which she held
against her forehead to shield her eyes did not tremble. From the little
Dutch cap, under the edge of which stray locks peeped, down over her
attire to her toes, she seemed to be still trim and trig, in spite of
her experiences below in the darkness and the wet. With a sort of mild
interest in her, he reflected that her up-country beau would be very
properly proud of her if he could see her there on that schooner's keel.
“What a picture you would make, Miss Candage, just as you are!” he
blurted. She took down her hand, and the look she gave him did not
encourage compliments. “Just as you are, and call it 'The Wreck,'”
he added.
“Do I look as badly as all that, Captain Mayo?”
“You look--” he expostulated, and hesitated, for her gaze was distinctly
not reassuring.
“Don't tell me, please, how I look. I'm thankful that I have no mirror.
Isn't that a piece of lumber?” she inquired, crisply, putting a stop on
further personalities. “Wait! It's down in a hollow just now.”