Part 27

It was a difficult task in the night, because the leadline had to be passed from the quarter-deck to the cathead outside the shrouds; the rails and deck were slippery. Plainly, Captain Downs was proposing to show Mayo “a thing or two.”

He let go the lead at command, and heard the man on the quarter-deck, catching the line when it swung into a perpendicular position, report twenty-five fathoms.

Again, answering the mate's bawled orders, Mayo carried the lead forward and dropped it, after a period of waiting, during which the schooner had been eased off. He was soaked to the skin, and was miserable in both body and mind. He had betrayed himself, he had made an enemy of the man who knew something which could help him; he felt a queer sense of shame and despair when he remembered the girl and the expression of her face. He tried to convince himself that he did not care what her opinion of him was. What happened to that love she had professed on board the Olenia? What manner of maiden was this? He did not understand!

Five times he made his precarious trip with the lead, fumbling his way outside the rigging.

In twenty fathoms Captain Downs decided to anchor, after the mate, “arming” the lead by filling its cup with grease, found that they were over good holding ground.

When the Alden came into the wind and slowed down, slapping wet sails, the second mate hammered out the holding-pin of the gigantic port anchor, and the hawse-hole belched fathom after fathom of chain.

All hands were on deck letting sails go on the run into the lazy-jacks, and the big schooner swung broadside to the trough of the sea. She made a mighty pendulum, rolling rails under, sawing the black skies with her towering masts.

There are many things which can happen aboard a schooner in that position when men are either slow or stupid. A big negro who was paying out the mizzen-peak halyards allowed his line to foul. Into the triangle of sail the wind volleyed, and the thirty-foot mizzen-boom, the roll of the ship helping, swung as far as its loosened sheets allowed. The “traveler,” an iron hoop encircling a long bar of iron fastened at both ends to the deck, struck sparks as a trolley pulley produces fire from a sleety wire.

With splintering of wood and clanging of metal, the iron bar was wrenched from its deck-fastenings and began to fly to and fro across the deck at the end of its tether, like a giant's slung-shot. It circled, it spun, it flung itself afar and returned in unexpected arcs.

Men fled from the area which this terror dominated.

The boom swung until it banged the mizzen shrouds to port, and then came swooping back across the deck, to slam against the starboard shrouds. The clanging, tethered missile it bore on its end seemed to be searching for a victim. When the boom met the starboard shrouds in its headlong rush, the schooner shivered.

“Free that halyard and douse the peak!” roared the first mate.

A sailor started, ducking low, but he ran back when the boom came across the deck with such a vicious swing that the iron bar fairly screamed through the air.

“Gawd-a-mighty! She'll bang the mast out of her!” clamored Captain Downs. “Get some men to those halyards, Mr. Dodge! Catch that boom!”

The mate ran and kicked at a sailor, shouting profane orders. He seized the fellow and thrust him toward the pins where the halyards were belayed. But at that instant the rushing boom came hurtling overhead with its slung-shot, and the iron banged the rail almost exactly where the fouled line was secured. The mate and the sailor fell flat on their faces and crawled back from the zone of danger.

“Get some rope and noose that boom! Lassoo it!” commanded the master, touching up his orders with some lurid sea oaths.

But the men who stepped forward did so timidly and slowly, and dodged back when the boom threatened. The flying bar was a terrible weapon. Now it swung in toward the mast—now swept in wider radius. Just where it would next sweep the deck between the masts depended on the vagary of wave and wind. It was perfectly apparent that anybody who got in its path would meet death as instantly as a fly under a housewife's spanker.

Life is sweet, even if a man is black and is toiling for a dollar-a-day wage.

And even if a man is a mate, at a higher wage and with more responsibility, he is inclined to think of himself before he figures on saving a mast and gear for a schooner's owners.

“What kind of a gor-rammed crew have I got aboard here?” shrieked the master.

“About the kind that all wind-jammers carry these days,” said a voice at his elbow.

Captain Downs whirled and found Mayo there. “How do you dare to speak to me, you tin-kettle sailor?” demanded the master. In his passion he went on: “You're aboard here under false pretenses. You can't even do your work. You have made this vessel liable by assaulting a passenger. You're no good! With you aboard here I'm just the same as one man short.” But he had no time to devote to this person.

He turned away and began to revile his mates and his sailors, his voice rising higher each time the rampaging boom crashed from side to side. One or two of the backstays had parted, and it was plain that before long the mast would go by the board.

“If that mast comes out it's apt to smash us clear to the water-line,” lamented the captain.

“If you can make your herd of sheep give me a hand at the right time, I'll show you that a tin-kettle sailor is as good as a wind-jammer swab,” said Mayo, retaliating with some of the same sort of rancor that Captain Downs had been expending. In that crisis he was bold enough to presume on his identity as a master mariner. “I'd hate to find this kind of a bunch on any steamboat I've ever had experience with.”

Then he ran away before the captain had time to retort. He made a slide across the danger zone on his back, like a runner in a ball game. This move brought him into a safe place between the mainmast and the mizzen. There was a coil of extra cable here, and he grabbed the loose end and deftly made a running bowline knot. He set the noose firmly upon his shoulders, leaped up, and caught at the hoops on the mizzenmast.

“See to it that the line runs free from that coil, and stand by for orders!” he shouted, and though his dyed skin was dark and he wore the garb of the common sailor, he spoke with the unmistakable tone of the master mariner. The second mate ran to the line and took charge.

“This is a bucking bronco, all right!” muttered Mayo. “But it's for the honor of the steamboat men! I'll show this gang!”

He poised himself for a few moments on the crotch of the boom, clinging to the cringles of the luff—the short ropes with which the sail is reefed.

As he stood there, gathering himself for his desperate undertaking, waiting for opportunity, taking the measure of the lashing and insensate monster whom he had resolved to subdue, he heard Captain Downs bawl an impatient command:

“Passengers go below!”

Mayo looked aft and saw Alma Marston clinging to the spike-rack of the spanker mast. The coach-house lantern shone upon her white face.

“Go below!” repeated the master.

She shook her head.

“This is no place for a woman.”

“The vessel is going to sink!” she quavered.

“The schooner is all right. You go below!”

How bitter her fear was Mayo could not determine. But even at his distance he could see stubborn resolution on her countenance.

“If I've got to die, I'll not die down there in a box,” she cried. “I'm going to stay right here.”

Captain Downs swore and turned his back on her. Apparently he did not care to come to a real clinch with this feminine mutineer.

The great spar crashed out to the extent of its arc, and the sail volleyed with it, ballooning under the weight of the wind. The reef-points were no longer within Mayo's reach. He ran along the boom, arms outspread to steady himself, and was half-way to its end before the telltale surge under him gave warning. Then he fell upon the huge stick, rolled under it, and shoved arms and legs under the foot of the sail. Barely had he clutched the spar in fierce embrace before it began its return journey. It was a dizzy sweep across the deck, a breath-taking plunge.

When the spar collided with the stays he felt as if arms and legs would be wrenched from his body. He did not venture to move or to relax his hold. He clung with all his strength, and nerved himself for the return journey. He had watched carefully, and knew something of the vagaries of the giant flail. When it was flung to port the wind helped to hold it there until the resistless surge of the schooner sent it flying wild once more. He knew that no mere flesh and blood could endure many of those collisions with the stays. He resolved to act on the next oscillation to port, in order that his strength might not be gone.

“See that the cable runs free!” he screamed as he felt the stick lift for its swoop.

He swung himself upward over the spar the moment it struck, and the momentum helped him. He ran again, steadying himself like a tight-wire acrobat. He snatched the noose from his shoulders, slipped it over the end of the boom, and yelled an order, with all the strength of his lungs:

“Pull her taut!”

At that instant the boom started to swing again.

Standing on the end of the spar, he was outboard; the frothing sea was under him. He could not jump then; to leap when the boom was sweeping across the deck meant a skinful of broken bones; to wait till the boom brought up against the stays, so he realized, would invite certain disaster; he would either be crushed between the boom and shrouds or snapped far out into the ocean as a bean 'is filliped by a thumb. On the extreme end of the spar the leverage would be so great that he could not hope to cling there with arms and legs.

A queer flick of thought brought to Mayo the phrase, “Between the devil and the deep sea.” That flying boom was certainly the devil, and the foaming sea looked mighty deep.

Her weather roll was more sluggish and Mayo had a moment to look about for some mode of escape.

He saw the sail of “number four” mast sprawling loose in its lazy-jacks, unfurled and showing a tumbled expanse of canvas. When he was inside the rail, and while the boom was gathering momentum, he took his life in his hands and his grit between his teeth and leaped toward the sail. He made the jump just at the moment when the boom would give him the most help.

He heard Captain Downs's astonished oath when he dove over that worthy mariner's head, a human comet in a twenty-foot parabola.

He landed in the sail on his hands and knees, yelling, even as he alighted: “Catch her, boys!”

They did it when the spar banged against the stays. They surged on the rope, tightened the noose, and before the vessel rolled again had made half a dozen turns of the free end of the cable around the nearest cleats.

Mayo scrambled down from the sail and helped them complete the work of securing the spar. He passed near Captain Downs when the job had been finished.

“Well,” growled the master of the Alden, “what do you expect me to say to that?”

“I simply ask you to keep from saying something.”

“What?”

“That a steamboat man can't earn his pay aboard a wind-jammer, sir. I don't like to feel that I am under obligations in any way.”

The master grunted.

“And if the little thing I have done helps to square that break I made by licking your passenger I'll be glad of it,” added Mayo.

“You needn't rub it in,” said Captain Downs, carefully noting that there was nobody within hearing distance. “When a man has been in a nightmare for twenty-four hours, like I've been, you've got to make some allowances, Captain Mayo. This is a terrible mixed-upmess.” He squinted at the mizzen rigging where the lanterns revealed the damage. “And by the way those backstays are ripped out, and seeing how that mast is wabbling, this schooner is liable to be about as badly mixed up as the people are on board of her.”

Mayo turned away and went back to his work. They were rigging extra stays for the mizzenmast. And he noted that the girl near the coach-house door was staring at him with a great deal of interest. But in that gloom he was only a moving figure among toiling men.

An hour later the mate ordered the oil-bags to be tied to the catheads. The bags were huge gunny sacks stuffed with cotton waste which was saturated with oil.

In spite of the fact that her spanker, double-reefed, was set in order to hold her up to the wind, weather-vane fashion, the schooner seemed determined to keep her broadside to the tumbling seas. The oil slick helped only a little; every few moments a wave with spoondrift flying from it would smash across the deck, volleying tons of water between rails, with a sound like thunder. At these times the swirling torrent in the waist would reach to a man's knees.

Mayo did not take his watch below. The excitement of his recent experience had driven away all desire for sleep, and the sheathing in the fo'c'sle was squawking with such infernal din that only a deaf man could have remained there in comfort.

However, he was not uneasy in regard to the safety of the schooner. In a winter gale, with ice caking on her, he would have viewed their situation in different light. But he had frequently seen the seas breaking over the wallowing coal-luggers when he had passed them at anchor on the coast.

He made a trip of his own along the main-deck, scrambling upon the spars to avoid the occasional deluge which swept her amidship. The battened hatches were apparently withstanding the onslaughts of the waves. He could feel less weight in the wind. It was apparent that the crisis of the blow had passed. The waves were not so savage; their crests were not breaking. But just then the second mate rushed past, and Mayo overheard the report he gave the captain, who was pacing the lee alley:

“The mizzenmast is getting more play, sir. I'm afraid it's raising the devil with the step and ke'lson.”

“Rig extra stays and try her again for water,” ordered the master.

Mayo, returning to the mizzen, found the entire crew grouped there. The mast was writhing and groaning in its deck collar, twisting its coat—the canvas covering at its foot where it entered the deck.

The dusky faces were exhibiting much concern. They had flocked where the ship was dealing herself a wound; the sailor sixth sense of impending trouble had drawn them there.

“Four of you hustle aloft and stand ready to make fast those stays!” commanded the first mate.

“Rest of you make ready tackle!” shouted the second mate, following close on Mayo's heels.

The negroes did not stir. They mumbled among themselves.

“Step lively!” insisted the mate.

“'Scuse us, but dat mast done goin' to tumble down,” ventured a man.

“Aloft with you, I say!”

Just then the schooner slatted herself on a great roller, and the starboard stays snapped, one after the other, like mammoth fiddle-strings. The mast reeled and there was an ominous sound below the deck.

“She done put a hole into herself!” squealed a sailor.

In the gloom their eyes were gleaming with the fires one beholds in the eyes of frightened cats.

“Dere she comes!” shouted one of them. He pointed trembling finger.

Over the coamings of the fore-hatch black water was bubbling.

Yelping like animals, the sailors stampeded aft in a bunch, bowling over Mayo and the mates in their rush.

“Stop 'em, captain!” bellowed the first mate, guessing their intent. He rose and ran after them. But fright gave them wings for their heels. They scampered over the roof of the after-house, and were on the quarter-deck before the skipper was out of the alley. They leaped into the yawl which was swung at the stern davits.

“You renegades!” roared the master. “Come out of that boat!”

With the two mates at his heels he rushed at them. They grabbed three struggling men by the legs and dragged them back. But the negroes wriggled loose, driven to frantic efforts by their panic. They threw themselves into the boat again.

“Be men!” clamored Mayo, joining the forces of discipline. “There's a woman aboard here!”

But the plea which might have affected an Anglo-Saxon did not prevail. Their knives were out—not for attack on their superiors, but to slash away the davit tackle.

“Come on, boys! Throw 'em out!” shouted the master, leading the way into the yawl over the rail.

His two mates and Mayo followed, and the engineer, freshly arrived from forward, leaped after them. But as fast as they tossed a man upon the quarter-deck he was up and in the boat again fighting for a place.

“Throw 'em overboard!” roared the master, venting a terrible oath. He knocked one of the maddened wretches into the sea. The next moment the captain was flat on his back, and the sailors were trampling on him.

Most of the surges came riding rail-high; sometimes an especially violent wave washed the deck aft.

Following it, a chasm regularly opened under the vessel's counter, a swirling pit in the ocean twenty feet deep.

There was good fortune as well as misfortune in the affair of the yawl. When at last it dropped it avoided the period of the chasm.

In spite of the efforts of the captain and his helpers the sailors succeeded in slashing away the davit tackle. A swelling roller came up to meet the boat as the last strand gave way and swept it, with its freight, out into the night. But as it went Mayo clutched a davit pulley and swung in midair.

The dizzy depths of the sea opened under him as he dangled there and gazed down.

An instant later all his attention was focused on Alma Marston, who stood in the companionway clutching its sides and shrieking out her fears. The lantern showed her to him plainly. Its radiance lighted him also. He called to her several times, angrily at last.

“Where is that man, Bradish?” he demanded, fiercely.

It seemed as if his arms would be pulled out. He could not reach the davit iron from where he hung; the schooner's rail was too far away, though he kicked his feet in that direction.

“Don't be a fool! Stop that screaming,” he told her. “Can Bradish!”

“He is sick—he—he—is frightened,” she faltered.

“Come out here! Pull on that rope! Swing me in, I can't hold on here much longer. Do you want to see me drown?”

She came along the rail, clinging to it.

“No, not that rope! The other one! Pull hard!”

She obeyed, fighting back her fear. The davit swung inward slowly, and he managed to slide his legs up over the rail and gain the deck.

“Thank you!” he gasped. “You're quite a sailor!”

He had been wondering what his first words to her would be. Even while he swung over the yawning depths of the sea the problem of his love was so much more engrossing than his fear of death that his thoughts were busy with her. He tried to speak to her with careless tone; it had been in his mind that he would speak and bow and walk away. But he could not move when she opened her eyes on him. She was as motionless as he—a silent, staring pallid statue of astounded fright. The rope slipped slowly from her relaxing fingers.

“Yes! It's just the man you think it is,” he informed her, curtly. “But there's nothing to be said!”

“I must say something—”

But he checked her savagely. “This is no place to talk over folly! It's no place to talk anything! There's something else to do besides talk!”