Masters of the Wheat-Lands Part 25

"Better come for'ard. Got to haul outer jib down before it blows away!"

he shouted.

Up to his knees in water, Wyllard staggered after him and made out by the mad banging that some one had already cast the peak of the boom-foresail loose. He reached the windla.s.s, and clutched it, as a sea that took him to the waist frothed in over the weather rail. The bows lurched out of it viciously, hurling another icy flood back on him, and he could see a dim white chaos of frothing water about and beneath them.

Above rose the black wedge of the jibs.

He did not want to get out along the bowsprit to stop one of them down, but there are many things flesh and blood shrink from which must be faced at sea. He made out that a Siwash was fumbling at the down-haul made fast near his side, and when the man's shadowy figure rose up against the whiteness of the foam he made a jump forward. Then he was on the bowsprit, lying upon it while he felt for the foot-rope slung beneath. He found it, and was cautiously lowering himself when the man in front of him called out harshly, and he saw a white sea range up ahead. It broke short over with a rush and roar, and he clung with hands and feet for his life as the schooner's dipping bows rammed the seething ma.s.s.

The vessel went into it to the windla.s.s. Wyllard was smothered in an icy flood that seemed bent on wrenching him from his hold, but that was only for a moment or two, and then, streaming with water, he was swung high above the sea again. It was bad enough merely to hold on, but that was a very small share of his task, for the big black sail that cut the higher darkness came rattling down its stay and fell upon him and his companion. As it dropped the wind took hold of the folds of it and buffeted them cruelly. As he clutched at the canvas it seemed to him incredible that he had not already been flung off headlong from the reeling spar. Still, that banging, thrashing canvas must be mastered somehow, though it was snow-soaked and almost unyielding, and with bleeding hands he clawed at it furiously while twice the bowsprit raked a sea and dipped him waist-deep into the water. At last, the other man flung him the end of the gasket, and they worked back carefully, leaving the sail lashed down, and scrambled aft to help the others who were making the big main-boom fast. When this was done Wyllard fell against Dampier and clutched at him.

"How's the wind?" he roared.

"Northeast," answered the skipper.

They could scarcely hear each other, though the schooner was lurching over it more easily now with shortened canvas, and Wyllard made Dampier understand that he wished to speak to him only by thrusting him towards the deck-house door. They went in together, and stood clutching at the table with the lamplight on their tense, wet faces and the brine that ran from them making pools upon the deck.

"The wind has hauled round," said the skipper, "the wrong way."

Wyllard made a savage gesture. "We've had it from the last quarter we wanted ever since we sailed, and we sailed nearly three months too late.

We're too close in to the beach for you to heave her to?"

"A sure thing," agreed Dampier. "I was driving her to work off it with the sea getting up when the breeze burst on us. She put her rail right under, and we had to let go 'most everything before she'd pick it up.

She's pointing somewhere north, jammed right up on the starboard tack just now, but I can't stand on."

This was evident to Wyllard, and he closed one hand tight. He wanted to stand on as long as possible before the ice closed in, but he realized that to do so would put the schooner ash.o.r.e.

"Well?" he questioned sharply.

Dampier made a grimace. "I'm going out to heave her round. If we'd any sense in us we'd square off the boom then, and leg it away across the Pacific for Vancouver."

"In that case," observed Wyllard, "somebody would lose his bonus."

The skipper swung around on him with a flash in his eyes. "The bonus!"

he repeated. "Who was it came for you with two dollars in his pocket after he'd bought his ticket from Vancouver?"

Wyllard smiled at him. "If you took that up the wrong way I'm sorry. She ought to work off on the port track, and when we've open water to leeward you can heave her to. When it moderates we can pick up the beach again."

"That's just what I mean to do."

Dampier went out on deck, while Wyllard, flinging off his dripping clothing, crawled into his bunk and went quietly to sleep.

CHAPTER XVI

THE FIRST ICE

Before they hove to the _Selache_, daylight broke on a frothing sea, across which scudded wisps of smoke-adrift and thin showers of snow.

With two little wet rags of canvas set the schooner lay almost head on to the big combers. Having little way upon her, she lurched over instead of ramming the waves, and though now and then one curled on board across her rail it was not often that there was much heavy water upon her slanted deck.

All around the narrow circle a leaden sky met the sea. It was bitterly cold, and the spray stung the skin like half-spent pellets from a gun.

There was only one man, in turn, exposed to the weather, and he had little to do but brace himself against the savage buffeting of the wind as he clutched the wheel. The _Selache_, for the most part, steered herself, lifting buoyantly while the froth came sluicing aft from her tilted bows, falling off a little with a vicious leeward roll when a comber bigger than usual smote her to weather, and coming up again streaming to meet the next. Sometimes she forged ahead in what is called at sea, by courtesy, a "smooth," and all the time shroud and stay to weather gave out tumultuous harmonies, and the slack of every rope to leeward blew out in unyielding curves.

Three of the white men lay sleeping or smoking in the little cabin, which was partly raised above and partly sunk beneath the after-deck. It was a reasonably strong structure, but it worked, and sweated, as they sat at sea, and the heat of the stove had further opened up the seams in it. Moisture dripped from the beams overhead, moisture trickled up and down the slanting deck, there were great globules of water on the bulk-heading, and everything, including the men's clothes and blankets, was wet. The men lay in their bunks from necessity, because it was a laborious matter to sit. They said very little since it was difficult to hear anything amid the cataclysm of elemental sound. It became at length almost a relief to turn out into inky darkness or misty daylight, dimmed by flying spray, to take a turn at the jarring wheel.

For three days the bad weather continued, and then, when the gale broke and a little pale sunshine streamed down on the tumbling sea, changing the gray combers to flashing white and green, the skipper gave her a double-reefed mainsail, part of the boom-foresail, and a jib or two, and thrashed her slowly back to the northward on the starboard tack. More than one of the men glanced over the taffrail longingly as the schooner gathered way. She was fast, and with a little driving and that breeze over her quarter she would bear them south toward warmth and ease at some two hundred miles a day, while the way they were going it would be a fight for every fathom with bitter, charging seas, and there lay ahead of them only cold and peril and toil incredible.

There are times at sea when human nature revolts from the strain that the overtaxed body must bear, the leaden weariness of worn-out limbs, and the subconscious effort to retain warmth and vitality in spite of the ceaseless lashing of the icy gale. Then, as aching muscles grow lax, the nervous tension becomes more insupportable, unless, indeed, utter weariness breeds indifference to the personal peril each time the decks are swept by a frothing flood, or a slippery spar must be clung to with frost-numbed and often bleeding hands. The men on the _Selache_ knew this, and it was to their credit that they obeyed when Dampier gave the word to put the helm up and trim the sheets over. Wyllard, however, stood a little apart with a hard-set face, and he looked forward over the plunging bows, for he was troubled by a sense of responsibility such as he had not felt since he had, one night several years before, asked for volunteers. He realized that an account of these men's lives might be demanded from him.

It was a fortnight later, and they had twice made a perilous landing without finding any sign of life on or behind the hammered beach, when they ran into the first of the ice. The gray day was near its end. The long heave faintly twinkling here and there, ran sluggishly after them.

When creeping through a belt of haze they came into sight of several blurrs of grayish white that swung with the dim, green swell. The _Selache_ was slowly lurching over it with everything aloft to the topsails then, and Dampier glanced at the ice with a feeling of deep anxiety.

"Earlier than I expected," he commented. "Anyway, it's a sure thing there's plenty more where that came from."

"Big patch away to starboard!" cried a man in the foremast shrouds.

Dampier turned to Wyllard. "What are you going to do?"

"What's most advisable?"

The skipper looked grave. "Well," he said, "that's quite simple. Get out of this, and head her south just as soon as we can, but I guess that's not quite what you mean."

"No," admitted Wyllard. "I meant for the next few hours or so. In a general way, we're still pushing on."

"I'm not worrying much about pushing her through. That ice is light and scattered, and as she's going it won't hurt her much if she plugs some in the dark. It's what we're going to do the next two weeks that I'm not sure about. If there's ice we mayn't fetch the creek, where we'd figured on laying her up. It's still most a hundred miles to the north of us.

The other inlet I'd fixed on is way further south."

This brought them back to the difficulty with which they had grappled at many a council. The men for whom they searched might have gone either north or south, or they might have gone inland, if, indeed, any of them survived.

"If we only knew how they had headed," said Wyllard quietly. "Still, right or not, I'm for pushing on."

Then Charly, who held the wheel, broke in.

"I guess it's north," he a.s.sented. "They'd have no use for fetching up among the Russians, and there's n.o.body else until you get to j.a.pan. No white men, anyway. Besides, from the Behring Sea to the Kuriles is quite a long way."

"If you were dumped down ash.o.r.e there, which way would you go?" Dampier asked.

"If I'd a wallet full of papers certifying me as a harmless traveler, it would be south just as hard as I could hit the trail. Guess I'd strike somebody out prospecting, or surveying, and they'd set me along to the Kuriles. Still, if I'd been sealing, I wouldn't head that way. No, sir.

That's dead sure."

There was a reason for this certainty, right or wrong, in the minds of the sealers. How many of the skins they brought home were obtained in open water where they could fish without molestation they alone knew; but they were regarded in certain quarters as poachers and outlaws, who deserved no mercy. They had their differences with the Americans who owned the Pribilofs. It was admitted that the Americans had bought the islands, and might reasonably be considered to have some claim upon the seals which frequented them. The free-lances bore their execrations and reprisals more or less resignedly, though that did not prevent them from occasionally exchanging compliments with oar b.u.t.ts or sealing clubs. But the Muscovite was a grim, mysterious figure they feared and hated.

"Then you'd have tried up north?" Wyllard suggested.

"Sure," answered the helmsman. "If I'd a boat and a rifle, and it was summer, I'd have pushed across for Alaska. You can eat birds and walrus, and a man might eat a fur-seal if he'd had nothing else for a week, though I've struck nothing that has more smell than the holluschickie blubber. If it was winter, I'd have tried the ice. The Huskies make out on it for weeks together, and quite a few of the steam whaler men have trailed an odd hundred or two miles over it one time or another. They hadn't tents and dog-teams either."

Wyllard's face grew anxious. He had naturally considered both courses, and had decided that they were out of the question. Seas do not freeze up solid, and that three men should transport a boat, supposing that they had one, over leagues of ice appeared impossible. An attempt to cross the narrow sea, which is either wrapped in mist or swept by sudden gales, in any open craft would clearly result only in disaster, but, admitting that, he felt that, had he been in those men's place, he would have headed north. There was one question which had all along remained unanswered, and that was how they had reached the coast from which they had sent their message.