Blow The Man Down Part 61

"My grudge, eh? My grudge!" the victor panted. "Because you wouldn't tell me how the sneaks ruined me? No! The girl isn't here now. I'll tell you! It's because you stole her self-respect and her good name, and it makes you too dirty a dog to be her husband!"

He picked up Bradish and threw him on the floor. When he turned he saw the girl's white, agonized, frightened face at the crack of the saloon door.

"Captain Downs!" she shrieked, "that negro is killing him. He's killing Ralph!"

The victor turned his back on her and lurched around the table on his way out. He stroked blood from his face with his palm, and was glad that she had not recognized him; and yet, her failure to do so, even though he was such a pitiable figure of the man she had known, was one more slash of the whip of anguish across his raw soul. For a moment they had stood there, face to face, and only blank unrecognition greeted him; it made this horrible contretemps seem all the more unreal.

Mayo did not pause to listen to the ravings of Captain Downs, who came thrusting past her. Dizzy, bleeding, half blind, he rushed up the forward companionway and went into the black night on deck.

The mate was bawling for all hands to shorten sail, and Mayo took his place with the toilers, who were manning sheets and downhauls.

XXIII - THE MONSTER THAT SLIPPED ITS LEASH

And there Captain Kirby proved a coward at last, And he played at bo-peep behind the mainmast, And there they did stand, boys, and shiver and shake, For fear that that terror their lives it would take.

--Admiral Benbow.

Rain came with the wind, and the weather settled into a sullen, driving, summer easterly.

Late summer regularly furnishes one of those storms to the Atlantic coast, a recrudescence of the wintry gales, a trial run of the elements, a sort of inter-equinoctial testing out so that Eurus may be sure that his bellows is in working condition.

Such a storm rarely gives warning ahead that it is to be severe. It seems to be a meteorological prank in order to catch mariners napping.

At midnight the _Alden_ was plunging into creaming seas, her five masts thrummed by the blast. With five thousand tons of coal weighting her, she wallowed like a water-soaked log.

Mayo, who was roused from his hideous agony of soul at four bells, morning, to go on deck for his watch, ventured as near the engine-room door as he dared, for the rain was soaking his meager garments and the red glow from within was grateful. The ship's pump was clanking, a circ.u.mstance in no way alarming, because the huge schooners of the coal trade are racked and wrenched in rough water.

The second mate came to the engine-room, lugging the sounding-rod to the light in order to examine the smear on its freshly chalked length.

He tossed it out on deck with a grunt of satisfaction. "Nothing to hurt!" he said to the engineer. "However, I'd rather be inside the capes in this blow. The old skimmer ain't what she used to be. Johnson, do you know that this schooner is all of two feet longer when she is loaded than when she is light?"

"I knew she was hogged, but I didn't know it was as bad as that."

"I put the lead-line on her before she went into the coal-dock this trip, and I measured her again in the stream yesterday. With a cargo she just humps right up like a monkey bound for war. That's the way with these five-masters! They get such a racking they go wrong before the owners realize."

"They'll never build any more, and I don't suppose they want to spend much money on the old ones," suggested the engineer.

"Naturally not, when they ain't paying dividends as it is." He stepped to the weather rail and sniffed. "I reckon the old man will be dropping the killick before long," he said.

Mayo knew something of the methods of schooner masters and was not surprised by the last remark.

In the gallant old days, when it was the custom to thrash out a blow, the later plan of anchoring a big craft in the high seas off the Delaware coast, with Europe for a lee, would have been viewed with a certain amount of horror by a captain.

But the modern skipper figures that there's less wear and tear if he anchors and rides it out. To be sure, it's no sort of a place for a squeamish person, aboard a loaded schooner whose mudhook clutches bottom while the sea flings her about, but the masters and crews of coal-luggers are not squeamish.

Mayo, glancing aft, saw two men coming forward slowly, stopping at regular intervals. The light of a lantern played upon their dripping oilskins. When they arrived at the break of the main-deck, near the forward house, he recognized Captain Downs and the first mate. The second mate stepped out and replied to the captain's hail.

"Bring a maul and some more wedges!" commanded the master.

"_Drusilla_ is getting her back up some more," commented the second mate, starting for the storeroom. "I don't blame her much. This is no place for an old lady, out here to-night." He ordered Mayo to accompany him.

In a few moments they reported to the captain, the mate carrying the two-headed maul and the young man bearing an armful of wedges.

Captain Downs bestowed on Mayo about the same attention he would have allowed to a galley c.o.c.kroach. He pointed to a gap in the rail.

"There--drive one in there," he told the mate. "Let that n.i.g.g.e.r hold the wedge." There was rancor in his voice--baleful hostility shone in his snapping eyes; no captain tolerates disobedience at sea, and Mayo had disregarded all discipline in the cabin.

The young man kneeled and performed the service and followed the party dutifully when they moved on to the next gap.

The pitching schooner groaned and grunted and squalled in all her fabric.

Every angle joint was working--yawing open and closing with dull grindings as the vessel rolled and plunged.

"By goofer, she's gritting her teeth in good shape!" commented the first mate.

"She ought to have been stiffened a year ago, when she first began to loosen and work!" declared Captain Downs. His anxiety stirred both his temper and his tongue. "I was willing to have my sixteenth into her a.s.sessed for repairs, but a stockholder don't have to go to sea! I wish I had an excursion party of owners aboard here now."

"When these old critters once get loose enough to play they rattle to pieces mighty fast," said the mate. "But this is nothing specially bad."

"Find out what we've got under us," snapped Captain Downs. The wedges had been driven. "Let this n.i.g.g.e.r carry the lead for'ard!"

It was a difficult task in the night, because the leadline had to be pa.s.sed 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.