The wind had shifted when it settled into the blow--a fact that the
Cap'n's shipmates did not realize, and which he was too disgusted
by their general inefficiency to explain to them. In his crippled
condition, in the gathering night, he figured that it would be
impossible for him to make Portland harbor, the only accessible
refuge. The one chance was to ride it out, and this he set himself
to do, grimly silent, contemptuously reticent. He held her nose up
to the open sea, allowing her only steerageway, the gale slithering
off her flattened sail.
The men who gazed on him from the waist saw in his resolution only
stubborn determination to punish them.
"He's sartinly the obstinatest man that ever lowered his head at ye,"
said Zeburee Nute, breaking in on the apprehensive mumble of his
fellows. "He won't stop at northin' when he's mad. Look what he's
done in Smyrna. But I call this rubbin' it in a darn sight more'n
he's got any right to do."
His lament ended in a seasick hiccough.
"I don't understand sailormen very well," observed Jackson Denslow;
"and it may be that a lot of things they do are all right, viewed
from sailorman standpoint. But if Cap Sproul wa'n't plumb crazy and
off'm his nut them times we offered him honors in our town, and if
he ain't jest as crazy now, I don't know lunatics when I see 'em."
"Headin' straight out to sea when dry ground's off that way," said
Murray, finning feeble hand to starboard, "ain't what Dan'l Webster
would do, with his intellect, if he was here."
Hiram Look sat among them without speaking, his eyes on his friend
outlined against the gloom at the wheel. One after the other the
miserable members of the Ancients and Honorables appealed to him for
aid and counsel.
"Boys," he said at last, "I've been figgerin' that he's just madder'n
blazes at what you done to the sails, and that as soon's he works
his mad off he'll turn tail. Judgin' from what he said to me, it ain't
safe to tackle him right away. It will only keep him mad. Hold tight
for a little while and let's see what he'll do when he cools. And
if he don't cool then, I've got quite a habit of gettin' mad myself."
And, hanging their hopes on this argument and promise, they crouched
there in their misery, their eyes on the dim figure at the wheel,
their ears open to the screech of the gale, their souls as sick within
them as were their stomachs.
In that sea and that wind the progress of the _Dobson_ was, as the
Cap'n mentally put it, a "sashay." There was way enough on her to
hold her into the wind, but the waves and the tides lugged her slowly
sideways and backward. And yet, with their present sea-room Cap'n
Sproul hoped that he might claw off enough to save her.
Upon his absorption in these hopes blundered Hiram through the night,
crawling aft on his hands and knees after final and despairing appeal
from his men.
"I say, Cap'n," he gasped, "you and I have been too good friends to
have this go any further. I've took my medicine. So have the boys.
Now let's shake hands and go ashore."
No reply from the desperate mariner at the wheel battling for life.
"You heard me!" cried Hiram, fear and anger rasping in his tones.
"I say, I want to go ashore, and, damme, I'm goin'!"
"Take your shoes in your hand and wade," gritted the Cap'n. "I ain't
stoppin' you." He still scorned to explain to the meddlesome
landsman.
"I can carry a grudge myself," blustered Hiram. "But I finally stop
to think of others that's dependent on me. We've got wives ashore,
you and me have, and these men has got families dependent on 'em.
I tell ye to turn round and go ashore!"
"Turn round, you devilish idjit?" bellowed the Cap'n. "What do you
think this is--one of your circus wagons with a span of hosses hitched
in front of it? I told you once before that I didn't want to be
bothered with conversation. I tell you so ag'in. I've got things on
my mind that you don't know anything about, and that you ain't got
intellect enough to understand. Now, you shut up or I'll kick you
overboard for a mutineer."
At the end of half an hour of silence--bitter, suffering
silence--Hiram broke out with a husky shout.
"There ye go, Cap'n," he cried. "Behind you! There's our chance!"
A wavering red flare lighted the sky, spreading upward on the mists.
The men forward raised a quavering cheer.
"Ain't you goin' to sail for it?" asked Hiram, eagerly. "There's our
chance to get ashore." He had crept close to the skipper.
"I s'pose you feel like puttin' on that piazzy hat of yourn and
grabbin' your speakin'-trumpet, leather buckets, and bed-wrench,
and startin' for it," sneered Cap'n Sproul in a lull of the wind.
"In the old times they had wimmen called sirens to coax men ashore.
But that thing there seems to be better bait of the Smyrna fire
department."
"Do you mean to tell me that you ain't agoin' to land when there's
dry ground right over there, with people signallin' and waitin' to
help you?" demanded the showman, his temper whetted by his fright.
The Cap'n esteemed the question too senseless to admit any reply
except a scornful oath. He at the wheel, studying drift and wind,
had pretty clear conception of their whereabouts. The scraggly ridge
dimly outlined by the fire on shore could hardly be other than Cod
Lead, where Colonel Gideon Ward and Eleazar Bodge were languishing.
It was probable that those marooned gentlemen had lighted a fire in
their desperation in order to signal for assistance. The Cap'n
reflected that it was about as much wit as landsmen would possess.
To Hiram's panicky mind this situation seemed to call for one line
of action. They were skippered by a madman or a brute, he could not
figure which. At any rate, it seemed time to interfere.
He crawled back again to the huddled group of the Ancients and
enlisted Ludelphus Murray, as biggest and least incapacitated by
seasickness.
They staggered back in the gloom and, without preface or argument,
fell upon the Cap'n, dragged him, fighting manfully and profanely,
to the companionway of the little house, thrust him down, after an
especially vigorous engagement of some minutes, slammed and bolted
the doors and shot the hatch. They heard him beating about within
and raging horribly, but Murray doubled himself over, his knees
against the doors, his body prone on the hatch.
His position was fortunate for him, for again the _Dobson_ jibed,
the boom of the mainsail slishing overhead. Hiram was crawling on
hands and knees toward the wheel, and escaped, also. When the little
schooner took the bit in her teeth she promptly eliminated the
question of seamanship. It was as though she realized that the
master-hand was paralyzed. She shook the rotten sail out of the
bolt-ropes with a bang, righted and went sluggishly rolling toward
the flare on shore.
"I don't know much about vessel managin'," gasped Hiram, "but seein'
that gettin' ashore was what I was drivin' at; the thing seems to
be progressin' all favorable."
Up to this time one passenger on the schooner appeared to be taking
calm or tempest with the same equanimity. This passenger was Imogene,
couched at the break of the little poop. But the cracking report of
the bursting sail, and now the dreadful clamor of the imprisoned
Cap'n Sproul, stirred her fears. She raised her trunk and trumpeted
with bellowings that shamed the blast.
"Let him up now, 'Delphus!" shouted Hiram, after twirling the wheel
vainly and finding that the _Dobson_ heeded it not. "If there ain't
no sails up he can't take us out to sea. Let him up before he gives
Imogene hysterics."
And when Murray released his clutch on the hatch it snapped back,
and out over the closed doors of the companionway shot the Cap'n,
a whiskered jack-in-the-box, gifted with vociferous speech.
Like the cautious seaman, his first glance was aloft. Then he spun
the useless wheel.
"You whelps of perdition!" he shrieked. "Lifts cut, mains'l blowed
out, and a lee shore a quarter of a mile away! I've knowed fools,
lunatics, and idjits, and I don't want to insult 'em by callin' you
them names. You--"
"Well, if we are any crazier for wantin' to go ashore where we belong
than you was for settin' out to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a night
like this, I'd like to have it stated why," declared Hiram.
"Don't you know enough to understand that I was tryin' to save your
lives by ratchin' her off'm this coast?" bellowed Cap'n Sproul.
"Just thought you was crazy, and think so now," replied the showman,
now fully as furious as the Cap'n--each in his own mind accusing the
other of being responsible for their present plight. "The place for
us is on shore, and we're goin' there!"
"What do you suppose is goin' to become of us when she strikes?"
bawled the Cap'n, clutching the backstay and leaning into the night.
"She'll strike shore, won't she? Well, that's what I want to strike.
It'll sound good and feel good."
For such gibbering lunacy as this the master mariner had no fit reply.
His jaws worked wordlessly. He kept his clutch on the backstay with
the dizzy notion that this saved him from clutching some one's
throat.
"You'd better begin to pray, you fellers," he cried at last, with
a quaver in his tones. "We're goin' smash-ti-belter onto them rocks,
and Davy Jones is settin' on extra plates for eight at breakfast
to-morrer mornin'. Do your prayin' now."
"The only Scripture that occurs to me just now," said Hiram, in a
hush of the gale, "is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.'"
That was veritably a Delphic utterance at that moment, had Hiram only
known it.
Some one has suggested that there is a providence that watches over
children and fools. It is certain that chance does play strange
antics. Men have fallen from balloons and lived. Other men have
slipped on a banana skin and died. Men have fought to save themselves
from destruction, and have been destroyed. Other men have resigned
themselves and have won out triumphantly.
The doomed _Dobson_ was swashing toward the roaring shore broadside
on. The first ledge would roll her bottom up, beating in her punky
breast at the same time. This was the programme the doleful skipper
had pictured in his mind. There was no way of winning a chance through
the rocks, such as there might have been with steerageway, a tenuous
chance, and yet a chance. But the Cap'n decided with apathy and
resignation to fate that one man could not raise a sail out of that
wreck forward and at the same time heave her up to a course for the
sake of that chance.
As to Imogene he had not reckoned.
Perhaps that faithful pachyderm decided to die with her master
embraced in her trunk. Perhaps she decided that the quarter-deck was
farther above water than the waist.
At any rate, curving back her trunk and "roomping" out the
perturbation of her spirit, she reared on her hind-legs, boosted
herself upon the roof of the house, and clawed aft. This
auto-shifting of cargo lifted the bow of the little schooner. Her
jibs, swashing soggily about her bow, were hoisted out of the water,
and a gust bellied them. On the pivot of her buried stern the _Dobson_
swung like a top just as twin ledges threatened her broadside, and
she danced gayly between them, the wind tugging her along by her
far-flung jibs.
In matter of wrecks, it is the outer rocks that smash; it is the teeth
of these ledges that tear timbers and macerate men. The straggling
remains are found later in the sandy cove.
But with Imogene as unwitting master mariner in the crisis, the
schooner dodged the danger of the ledges by the skin of her barnacled
bottom, spun frothing up the cove in the yeast of the waves, bumped
half a dozen times as though searching suitable spot for
self-immolation, and at last, finding a bed of white sand, flattened
herself upon it with a racket of demolition--the squall of drawing
spikes her death-wail, the boom of water under her bursting deck her
grunt of dissolution.
The compelling impulse that drives men to close personal contact in
times of danger had assembled all the crew of the schooner upon the
poop, the distracted Imogene in the centre. She wore the trappings
of servitude--the rude harness in which she had labored to draw up
the buckets of dirt on Cod Lead, the straps to which the tackle had
been fastened to hoist her on board the _Dobson_.
When the deck went out from under them, the elephant was the biggest
thing left in reach.
And as she went sturdily swimming off, trunk elevated above the
surges, the desperate crew of the _Dobson_ grabbed at straps and
dangling traces and went, too, towing behind her. Imogene could reach
the air with the end of her uplifted trunk. The men submerged at her
side gasped and strangled, but clung with the death-grip of drowning
men; and when at last she found bottom and dragged herself up the
beach with the waves beating at her, she carried them all, salvaged
from the sea in a fashion so marvellous that Cap'n Aaron Sproul, first
on his legs, had no voice left with which to express his sentiments.
He staggered around to the front of the panting animal and solemnly
seized her trunk and waggled it in earnest hand-shake.
"You're a dumb animile," he muttered, "and you prob'ly can't have
any idea of what I'm meanin' or sayin'. But I want to say to you,
man to elephant, that I wouldn't swap your hind-tail--which don't
seem to be of any use, anyway--for the whole Smyrna fire company.
I'm sayin' to you, frank and outspoken, that I was mad when you first
come aboard. I ask your pardon. Of course, you don't understand that.
But my mind is freer. Your name ought to be changed to Proverdunce,
and the United States Government ought to give you a medal bigger'n
a pie-plate."
He turned and bent a disgusted stare on the gasping men dimly outlined
in the gloom.
"I'd throw you back again," he snapped, "if it wa'n't for givin' the
Atlantic Ocean the colic."
One by one they staggered up from the beach grass, revolved dizzily,
and with the truly homing instinct started away in the direction of
the fire-flare on the higher land of the island.
Of that muddled company, he was the only one who had the least
knowledge of their whereabouts or guessed that those responsible for
the signal-fire were Colonel Gideon Ward and Eleazar Bodge. He
followed behind, steeling his soul to meet those victims of the
complicated plot. An astonished bleat from Hiram Look, who led the
column, announced them. Colonel Ward was doubled before the fire,
his long arms embracing his thin knees. Eleazar Bodge had just
brought a fresh armful of driftwood to heap on the blaze.
"We thought it would bring help to us," cried the Colonel, who could
not see clearly through the smoke. "We've been left here by a set
of thieves and murderers." He unfolded himself and stood up. "You
get me in reach of a telegraph-office before nine o'clock to-morrow
and I'll make it worth your while."
"By the long-horned heifers of Hebron!" bawled Hiram. "We've come
back to just the place we started from! If you built that fire to
tole us ashore here, I'll have you put into State Prison."
"Here they are, Bodge!" shrieked the Colonel, his teeth chattering,
squirrel-like, in his passion. "Talk about State Prison to me! I'll
have the whole of you put there for bunco-men. You've stolen fifteen
thousand dollars from me. Where is that old hell-hound that's got
my check?"
"Here are six square and responsible citizens of Smyrna that heard
you make your proposition and saw you pass that check," declared
Hiram, stoutly, awake thoroughly, now that his prized plot was
menaced. "It was a trade."
"It was a steal!" The Colonel caught sight of Cap'n Sproul on the
outskirts of the group. "You cash that check and I'll have you behind
bars. I've stopped payment on it."
"Did ye telegraft or ride to the bank on a bicycle?" inquired the
Cap'n, satirically. He came straight up to the fire, pushing the
furious Colonel to one side as he passed him. Angry as Ward was, he
did not dare to resist or attack this grim man who thus came upon
him, dripping, from the sea.
"Keep out of the way of gentlemen who want to dry themselves," grunted
the skipper, and he calmly took possession of the fire, beckoning
his crew to follow him. The Colonel and Mr. Bodge were shut out from
the cheering blaze.
The first thing Cap'n Sproul did, as he squatted down, was to pull
out his wallet and inspect the precious check.
"It's pretty wet," he remarked, "but the ink ain't run any. A little
dryin' out is all it needs."
And with Ward shouting fearful imprecations at him over the heads
of the group about the fire, he proceeded calmly to warm the check,
turning first one side and then the other to the blaze.
"If you try to grab that," bawled Hiram, who was squatting beside
the Cap'n, eying him earnestly in his task, "I'll break in your head."
Then he nudged the elbow of the Cap'n, who had remained apparently
oblivious of his presence. "Aaron," he muttered, "there's been some
things between us to-night that I wish hadn't been. But I'm
quick-tempered, and I ain't used to the sea, and what I done was on
the spur of the moment. But I've shown that I'm your friend, and I'll
do more to show--"
"Hiram," broke in the Cap'n, and his tone was severe, "mutiny ain't
easy overlooked. But considerin' that your elephant has squared
things for you, we'll let it stand as settled. But don't ever talk
about it. I'm havin' too hard work to control my feelin's."
And then, looking up from the drying check, he fixed the vociferous
Colonel with flaming eyes.
"Did ye hear me make a remark about my feelin's?" he rasped. "Your
business and my business has been settled, and here's the paper to
show for it." He slapped his hand across the check. "I didn't come
back here to talk it over." He gulped down his wrathful memory of
the reasons that had brought him. "You've bought Bodge. You've bought
Cap Kidd's treasure, wherever it is. You're welcome to Bodge and to
the treasure. And, controllin' Bodge as you do, you'd better let him
make you up another fire off some little ways from this one, because
this one ain't big enough for you and me both." The Cap'n's tone was
significant. There was stubborn menace there, also. After gazing for
a time on Sproul's uncompromising face and on the check so
tantalizingly displayed before the blaze, Colonel Ward turned and
went away. Ten minutes later a rival blaze mounted to the heavens
from a distant part of Cod Lead Nubble. Half an hour later Mr. Bodge
came as an emissary. He brought the gage of battle and flung it down
and departed instantly.
"Colonel Ward says for me to say to you," he announced, "that he'll
bet a thousand dollars you don't dare to hand that check into any
bank."
"And you tell him I'll bet five thousand dollars," bellowed the Cap'n,
"that I not only dare to cash it, but that I'll get to a bank and
do it before he can get anywhere and stop payment."
"It's a pretty fair gamble both ways," remarked Hiram, his sporting
instincts awake. "You may know more about water and ways of gettin'
acrost that, but if this wind holds up the old spider will spin out
a thread and ride away on it. He's ga'nt enough!"
Cap'n Sproul made no reply. He sat before his fire buried in thought,
the gale whipping past his ears.
Colonel Ward, after ordering the returned and communicative Bodge
to shut up, was equally thoughtful as he gazed into his fire.
Ludelphus Murray, after trying long and in vain to light a soggy
pipeful of tobacco, gazed into the fire-lit faces of his comrades
of the Ancients and Honorables of Smyrna and said, with a sickly grin:
"I wisht I knew Robinson Crusoe's address. He might like to run out
and spend the rest of the fall with us."
But the jest did not cheer the gloom of the marooned on Cod Lead
Nubble.