Dan Merrithew Part 6

Suddenly a long, triumphant scream of a whistle rang across the dawn--a roll of water parted a retiring wave. The big white yacht moved of her own power. Again the whistle sounded, as though in joy that the vessel had at last found herself. Once more. . . . She mounted the waves in proud defiance. . . . The tow-lines slackened.

"Cast off, cast off!" megaphoned an officer, while two of his sailors threw the ends of the cables into the sea. The deck-hand and fireman started to bring them in, while Dan gave the signal for Crampton to go ahead.

The tug started timidly forward and then hesitated and trembled. A wave hit her, and she rocked like a cork. The jump had all gone out of her. Another wave struck her and almost hove her down, and then another wave snapped her back again, jerking out the funnel, which hissed overside into the sea. Half on her side, she clanked into the trough. She struggled to right herself and had partly succeeded, when a mighty wave smote her viciously on her listed side. She went over to her beam ends and lay there a second, while Dan and his men shot through the windows, off from the deck, into the sea. Another instant and the _Fledgling_ rolled her keel to the morning light and swiftly disappeared.

As Dan rose on a wave he saw her go, saw too, the white face of his engineer framed in the engine-room doorway, which a wave filled just as she turned, obliterating the face forever.

The next few minutes were nothing but a buffeting, swirling confusion.

Suddenly a line struck Dan's face . . . his hands closed upon a circular life preserver. . . . The next instant he lay gasping on the deck of the _Veiled Ladye_, beside his deck-hand and mate.

Half an hour later, Dan, in warm clothes, sat upon the pitching deck of the yacht, at the doorway of the saloon.

The _Fledgling_ gone and Welch and Crampton--that was all he could think of as he sat gazing into the gray of the waters, which in closing over the black tragedy immediately presented a surface as free from all evidence of guilt as the placid surface of a mill-pond. He had made himself in the _Fledgling_,--had rounded to the measure of a man aboard of her,--had grown in the plenitude of man's strength and will and courage and success. He felt the loss of his tug; it hit him hard; he suffered in every mental corner and cranny. And when the two men who had given their lives for him and for the yacht came to mind in all the clearness of their personality and devotion to him, his head sank on his hand and he groaned aloud.

A hand was laid gently on his shoulder, and looking up, he saw Mr.

Howland and a tall, beautiful girl by his side, both gazing at him from the doorway with eyes filled with compa.s.sion.

"You were the captain of the tug?" asked Mr. Rowland.

"Yes, Captain Merrithew," and Dan ceased speaking and gazed at the deck.

"You owned the tug?"

"No," replied Dan.

"Captain Merrithew, I cannot say anything adequate. I appreciate what you have done--I cannot say how much."

"Oh, father," broke in the girl, "tell him it was n.o.ble!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Oh, father," broke in the girl, "tell him it was n.o.ble!"]

"It was n.o.ble," resumed Mr. Howland. "It was big and fine--you saved a score of lives, and for them you gave your tug and part of your crew.

I cannot reward such men as you--I can pay just debts, though. Your men shall not suffer; neither shall the families of those who were lost."

Then he paused a minute and reached behind the door jamb, bringing out a water-soaked bit of plank. "One of our best men picked this from the water. You had been clinging to it. I thought you might like to have it in your cabin."

It was the name board of the _Fledgling_.

CHAPTER VI

THE BRAVE AND THE FAIR

As Dan seized the strip with its gilt letters and was about to reply, the yacht slung sideways, and a wave arising amidships smote the deck-house a l.u.s.ty, full-bodied blow. It suddenly occurred to the tugboat captain that the craft, all the time he had been aboard trying to collect his bewildered senses, had acted strangely. He turned to Mr. Howland.

"What's the matter with your yacht?"

Howland was a good deal of a thoroughbred, and yet he could not conceal his eagerness as he spoke.

"The yacht was just what I wanted to speak to you about, Captain," he said. "I know I have no right to ask anything more of you, but if you have pulled together, I think we seem to need your a.s.sistance. Our Captain was washed off the bridge, and the first mate is below with a broken leg. The situation, I am afraid, is beyond young Terry, the second mate; I--"

As the import of what Mr. Howland was trying to say flashed across Dan's mind, he turned abruptly, without waiting for the completion of the sentence, and ran for the bridge.

Without a glance at the second officer, who seemed on the verge of a complete funk, he shouldered the two sailors from the wheel and hauled on the spokes with all the strength of his long arms. As the yacht began to respond he seized the indicator crank and called for full speed ahead. The whistle of the bridge speaking-tube sounded viciously, and Dan, placing his ear to the receiver, caught the words of the old chief engineer as they flowed up in profane vehemence.

"Say, do you know what you want up there? If I had a man down here who knew an engine from a plate of fruit, I'd 'a' been up there and snaked you off the bridge long ago. I've been on my back under that triply d.a.m.ned shaft for twelve hours and now--" the rest of the sentence was an a.s.sortment of well-chosen oaths.

The outburst greeted Dan's ears sweetly. Evidently Howland had a man down below the water line, anyway. He grinned as he clapped his lips to the tube.

"I've just come aboard to take charge of this craft," he yelled; "now you do as I say and do it quick. See!"

A great relieved, blasphemous roar came up the tube, and the next instant the engines were laying down to their work.

The bow began to cut nicely into the waves, and Dan turned to the two sailors.

"Here, you boys, tail on here and steer as I tell you." Whereupon, fingering a pocket compa.s.s, he called the course, after which he fastened the little instrument to the wreck of the binnacle.

"We will pull through," he said, turning to Mr. Howland, who, with his daughter, had followed him to the bridge. "We are somewhere off the Winter Quarter Shoals; if I can get the sun at noon I'll know exactly; anyway, we will make Norfolk if that shaft holds. If it doesn't--well, banking on that engineer you've got down below, I think it will hold."

Then inclining his head in the direction of Miss Howland, he added, "I'd advise you to go below, Miss Howland." He thrilled as he uttered her name, "You're wet; and then--I may have to swear."

"I should love awfully to hear some one swear to some purpose," she replied. "Oh, I want to stay," she cried, speaking to her father, as Dan suddenly turned his back and spoke to the second mate. "Father, I am going to stay. The rest are seasick or frightened to pieces. I feel braver up here."

She was perfectly candid. She did feel braver there on the bridge.

For Dan was the one dominant personality aboard the yacht. In her eyes he typified bravery, skill, strength--safety, in a word, for all. It was as though out of the wrack of despair and the overriding elements had arisen the spirit of a man and all that at best he stands for, to reclaim the lost honors of the darker hours. And so she clung to him with her eyes and felt she could smile at danger; her soul went out to him and enveloped him with grat.i.tude and tenderness. And she neither knew nor cared whether in these emotions was the uprearing of woman's submerged, primal nature, giving all to the sheer power of the stronger s.e.x, or whether it was the result of a burden of dread suddenly lifted from her heart--it made no difference which. She was living the moment--here and now--clear, serene, justified, and enn.o.bled.

And standing thus she watched him as he snapped the yacht slantwise from the grip of succeeding sea hollows and guided her over the gray hills, panting and straining, with much of pudgy deliberation, but surely.

"We will make it easily," said Dan, "if nothing happens."

"Good," cried Mr. Rowland, and, taking his daughter by the arm, he added, "come below, Virginia, and give them the good news. Your friend Oddington has forgotten his cigarettes for a full twenty-four hours, and the Dale girls are candidates for a sanitarium." There was a chuckle of relief in his voice.

Dan turned to watch the girl as she followed her father from the bridge. He was certain he had never seen anything so inspiring as Virginia Howland standing braced square to the wind, her trim blue skirt winding and unwinding; her cap in her hand; the wind tossing her heavy hair in myriads of glowing pennons, which beat on the blush-surged cheeks, alternately hiding and disclosing the sparkle of the deep gray eyes or the flash of perfect teeth from between parted lips.

It was a picture upon which he permitted himself to ponder but an instant, however, for the wind was shifting again from the northeast, growling ominously, and the yacht, humping along at a ridiculous speed of six knots, made the situation less satisfactory than it had been.

He spoke to Terry over his shoulder.

"As you see," he said, "we're running into some new sort of h.e.l.l," and he glanced impatiently at the potential riot ahead. "Have these men keep the course and look out for things, will you? I'm going down to the engine-room for a few minutes."

"Very well, sir," said the young officer.

Dan found old Jim Arthur, the chief, swearing softly as he moved about his engines with a long-spouted oil can.

"It is beginning to breeze again," said Dan. "I'm the new Captain and I came down to tell you I don't think much of your machinery, and to ask if the shaft will hold out."

"The shaft'll hold," said the engineer. Then he paused and looked at Dan in supreme disgust. "Engines!" he snorted. "I've been holdin' 'em together with my fingers since we left San Domingo. Cap'n, they'd been fine for a Swiss cuckoo clock. Why, they're only held together by gilt paint and polish. See how old Howland's had 'em painted--like a bedizened old maid! I do believe he's got 'em perfumed. Well, they may hold--"

Dan, who had been glancing about the engine-room, interrupted the engineer's pessimistic outburst.