Part 10

“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.