Blow The Man Down Part 23

"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 st.u.r.dily.

"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 sh.e.l.l 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 G.o.d'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 rea.s.suring 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, hoa.r.s.ely. 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n.

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 G.o.d, 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."