Chapter 7

Mayo was a sailor who knew that coast, and he admitted to himself that Candage's stubbornness was justified.

“I ain't responsible for your getting aboard here. I'll land you as soon as I can--and that covers the law, sir.”

During a prolonged silence the two men stared at each other.

“At any rate, Captain Candage, I trust you will not consider that you have a right to keep me tied up here any longer.”

“Now that there's a better understanding about who is boss aboard here, I don't know as I'm afraid to have you at large,” admitted the skipper. “I only warn you to remember your manners and don't forget that I'm captain.”

He flourished his clasp-knife and bent and cut the lashings. Then he strode across the cabin and performed like service for his daughter.

“I reckon I can afford to have _you_ loose, too, now that you can't tell me my business in front of a lot of skylarkers throwing kisses right and left!”

“Father! Oh, oh!” She put her hands to her face.

Captain Candage seemed to be having some trouble in keeping up his rôle of a bucko shipmaster; he shifted his eyes from Mayo's scowl and surveyed his daughter with uncertainty while he scratched his ear.

“When a man ain't boss on his own schooner he might as well stop going to sea,” he muttered. “Some folks knows it's the truth, being in a position to know, and others has to be showed!” He went stamping up the companionway into the night.

Captain Mayo waited, for some minutes. The girl did not lift her head.

“About that--What he said about--You understand! I know better!” he faltered.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, gratefully, still hiding her face from him.

“Men sometimes do very foolish things.”

“I didn't know my father could be like this.”

“I was thinking about the men who came and annoyed him. I can understand how he felt, because I am 'a 'native' myself.”

“I thought you were from outside.”

“My name is Boyd Mayo. I'm from Mayoport.”

She looked up at him with frank interest.

“My folks built this schooner,” he stated, with modest pride.

“I'm Polly Candage--I'm named for it.”

“It's too bad!” he blurted. “I don't mean to say but what the name is all right,” he explained, awkwardly, “but I don't think that either of us is particularly proud of this old hooker right at the present moment.” He went across the cabin and sat down on a transom and, tested the bump on the back of his head with cautious palm.

She did not reply, and he set his elbows on his knees and proceeded to nurse his private grouch in silence, quite excluding his companion from his thoughts. Now that he had been snatched so summarily from his hateful position on board the _Olenia_, his desire to leave her was not so keen. After Mayo's declaration to the owner, Marston might readily conclude that his skipper had deserted. His reputation and his license as a shipmaster were in jeopardy, and he had already had a bitter taste of Marston's intolerance of shortcomings. If Marston cared to bother about breaking such a humble citizen, malice had a handy weapon. But most of all was Mayo concerned with the view Alma Marston would take of the situation. She would either believe that he had fallen overboard in the skirmish with the attacking Polly or had deserted without warning--and in the case of a lover both suppositions were agonizing. His distress was so apparent that the girl, from her seat on the opposite transom, extended sympathy in the glances she dared to give him.

“How did you tear your coat so badly in the back?” she ventured at last.

“Spikes your excellent father left sticking out of his martingale,” he said, a sort of boyish resentment in his tones.

“Then it is only right that I should offer to mend it for you.”

She hurried to a locker, as if glad of an excuse to occupy herself. She produced her little sewing-basket and then came to him and held out her hand.

“Take it off, please.”

“You needn't trouble,” he expostulated, still gruff.

“I insist. Please let me do a little something to make up for the _Polly's_ naughtiness.”

“It will be all right until I can get ashore--and perhaps I'll never have need to wear the coat again, anyway.”

“Won't you allow me to be doing something that will take my mind off my troubles, sir?” Then she snapped her finger into her palm and there was a spirit of matronly command in her voice, in spite of her youth. “I insist, I say! Take off your coat.”

He obeyed, a little grin crinkling at the corners of his mouth--a flicker of light in his general gloom. After he had placed the coat in her hands he sat down on the transom and watched her busy fingers. She worked deftly. She closed in the rents and then darned the raveled places with bits of the thread pulled from the coat itself.

“You are making it look almost as good as new.”

“A country girl must know how to patch and darn. The folks in the country haven't as many things to throw away as the city folks have.”

“But that--what you are doing--that's real art.”

“My aunt does dressmaking and I have helped her. And lately I have been working in a millinery-shop. Any girl ought to know how to use her needle.”

He remembered what Mr. Speed had said about the reason for her presence on the _Polly_. He cast a disparaging glance around the bare cabin and decided in his mind that Mr. Speed had reported truthfully and with full knowledge of the facts. Surely no girl would choose that sort of thing for a summer vacation.

She bent her head lower over her work and he was conscious of warmer sympathy for her; their troubled affairs of the heart were in similar plight. He felt an impulse to say something to console her and knew that he would welcome understanding and consolation from her; promptly he was afraid of his own tongue, and set curb upon all speech.

“A man never knows how far he may go in making fool talk when he gets started,” he reflected. “Feeling the way I do to-night, I'd better keep the conversation kedge well hooked.”

Now that her hands were busy, she did not find the silence embarrassing. Mayo returned to his ugly meditations.

After a time he was obliged to shift himself on the transom. The schooner was heeling in a manner which showed the thrust of wind. He glanced up and saw that the rain was smearing broad splashes on the dingy glass of the windows. The companion hatch was open, and when he cocked his ear, with mariner's interest in weather, he heard the wind gasping in the open space with a queer “guffle” in its tone.

Instinctively he began to look about the cabin for a barometer.

Already that day the _Olenia's_ glass had warned him by its downward tendency. He wondered whether further reading would indicate something more ominous than fog.

Across the cabin he noted some sort of an instrument swinging from a hook on a carline. He investigated. It was a makeshift barometer, the advertising gift of a yeast company. The contents of its tube were roiled to the height of the mark which was lettered “Tornado.”

“You can't tell nothing from that!” Captain Candage had come down into the cabin and stood behind his involuntary guest. “It has registered 'Tornado' ever since the glass got cracked. And even at that, it's about as reliable as any of the rest of them tinkerdiddle things.”

“Haven't you a regular barometer--an aneroid?” inquired Captain Mayo.

“I can smell all the weather I need to without bothering with one of them contrivances,” declared the master of the schooner, in lordly manner. He began to pull dirty oilskins out of a locker.

Mayo hurried up the companionway and put out his head. There were both weight and menace in the wind which hooted past his ears. The fog was gone, but the night was black, without glimmer of stars. The white crests of the waves which galloped alongside flaked the darkness with ominous signalings.

“If you can smell weather, Captain Candage, your nose ought to tell you that this promises to be something pretty nasty.”

“Oh, it might be called nasty by lubbers on a gingerbread yacht, but I have sailed the seas in my day and season, and I don't run for an inshore puddle every time the wind whickers a little.” He was fumbling with a button under his crisp roll of chin beard and gave the other man a stare of superiority.

“You don't class me with yacht-lubbers, do you?”

“Well, you was just on a yacht, wasn't you?”

“Look here, Captain Candage, you may just as well understand, now and here, that I'm one of your kind of sailors. Excuse me for personal talk, but I want to inform you that from fifteen to twenty I was a Grand-Banksman. Last season I was captain of the beam trawler _Laura and Marion_. And I have steamboated in the Sound and have been a first mate in the hard-pine trade in Southern waters. I have had a chance to find out more or less about weather.”

“Un-huh!” remarked the skipper, feigning indifference. “What about it?”

“I tell you that you have no business running out into this mess that is making from east'ard.”

“If you have been so much and so mighty in your time, then you understand that a captain takes orders from nobody when he's on board his own vessel.”

“I understand perfectly well, sir. I'm not giving orders. But my own life is worth something to me and I have a right to tell you that you are taking foolhardy chances. And you know it, too!”

Captain Candage's gaze shifted. He was a coaster and he was naturally cautious, as Apple-treers are obliged to be. He knew perfectly well that he was in the presence of a man who knew! He had not the assurance to dispute that man, though his general grudge against all the world at that moment prompted him.

“I got out because they drove me out,” he growled.

“A man can't afford to be childish when he is in command of a vessel, sir. You are too old a skipper to deny that.”

“I was so mad I didn't stop to smell weather,” admitted the master, bracing himself to meet a fresh list of the heeling _Polly_. He evidently felt that he ought to defend his own sagacity and absolve himself from mariner's culpability.

“Very well! Let it go at that! But what are you going to do?”

“I can't beat back to Saturday Cove against this wind--not now! She would rack her blamed old butts out.”

“Then run her for Lumbo Reach. You can quarter a following sea. She ought to ride fairly easy.”

“That's a narrow stab in a night as black as this one is.”

“I'll make a cross-bearing for you. Where's your chart?” Mayo exhibited a sailor's alert anxiety to be helpful.

“I 'ain't ever needed a chart--not for this coast.”

“Then I'll have to guess at it, sir.” He closed his eyes in order to concentrate. “You gave a course of sou'west by sou'. Let's see--it was nine-fifteen when I just looked and we must have logged--”

“It ain't no use to stab for such a hole in the wall as Lumbo Reach,” declared Candage in discouraged tones.

“But you've got your compass and I can--”

“There ain't no depending on my compass within two points and a half.”

“Confound it, I can make allowance, sir, if you'll tell me your deviation!”

“But it's a card compass and spins so bad in a seaway there ain't no telling, anyway. In my coasting I haven't had to be particular.”

“Not as long as you had an apple-tree in sight,” jeered Mayo, beginning to lose his temper.

“I don't dare to run in the direction of anything that is solid--we'll hit it sure, 'n' hell-fire will toast corn bread. We've got to stay to sea!”

Captain Mayo set his teeth and clenched his fists and took a few turns up and down the cabin. He looked up into the night through the open hatch of the companion-way. The pale glimmer of the swinging lamp tossed a mild flare against the blackness and lighted two faces which were limned against that pall. Both Oakum Otie and Smut-nosed Dolph were at the wheel. Their united strength was needed because the schooner was yawing madly every now and then when the mightier surges of the frothing sea hoisted her counter, chasing behind her like wild horses. Those faces, when Mayo looked on them, were very solemn. The two were crouching like men who were anxious to hide from a savage beast. They grunted as they struggled with the wheel, trying to hold her up when the _Polly_ tobogganed with rushes that were almost breath-checking.

Mayo hastened to the girl. “I must have my coat, Miss Candage. I thank you. It will do now.”

She held it open for his arms, as a maid might aid her knight with his armor. “Are we in danger?” she asked, tremulously.

“I hope not--only it is uncomfortable--and needless,” he said, with some irritation.

“Must I stay down here--alone?”

“I would! It's only a summer blow, Miss Candage. I'm sure we'll be all right.”

Captain Candage had gone on deck, rattling away in his stiff oilskins.

Mayo followed, but the master came down a few steps into the companionway and intercepted the volunteer, showing a final smolder of his surliness.

“I want to notify you that I can run my own bo't, sir!”

“Yes, run it with a yeast barometer, a straw bottom, a pinwheel compass, and your general cussedness of disposition,” shouted Mayo into the whirl of the wind, his anxiety whetting his much-tried temper.

“If you're feeling that way, I don't want you up here.”

“I'm feeling worse than you'll ever understand, you stubborn old fool!”

“I let one man call me a fool to-day and I didn't make back talk--but I know where to draw the line,” warned Candage.

“Look here, I propose to start in with you right now, sir, on a basis you'll understand! I say you're a fool and need a guardian--and from now on I'm going to make my bigness aboard here! Get out of my way!”

Captain Mayo then emphasized his opinion of Captain Candage by elbowing the master to one side and leaping out on deck.

“That may be mutiny,” stated Mr. Speed through set teeth, checking the startled exclamation from his helper at the wheel. “But, by the Judas I-scarrot, it's a Mayo that's doing it! Remember that, Dolph!”

VIII ~ LIKE BUGS UNDER A THIMBLE

Up comes the skipper from down below, And he looks aloft and he looks alow. And he looks alow and he looks aloft, And it's, “Coil up your ropes, there, fore and aft.” With a big Bow-wow! Tow-row-row! Fal de rai de, ri do day! --Boston Shanty.

Captain Mayo strode straight to the men at the wheel. “Give me those spokes!” he commanded. “I'll take her! Get in your washing, boys!”

“Ay, ay, sir!” assented Mr. Speed, giving the resisting Dolph a violent shove.

When Captain Candage began to curse, Captain Mayo showed that he had a voice and vocabulary of his own. He fairly roared down the master of the _Polly_.

“Now shut up!” he ordered the dumfounded skipper, who faced him, mouth agape. “This is no time for any more foolishness. It's a case of work together to save our lives. Down with 'em, boys!”

“That's right,” declared the mate. “She don't need much of anything on her except a double-reefed mitten with the thumb brailed up.”

The wind had not attained the velocity of a gale, but it did have an ugly growl which suggested further violence. Mayo braced himself, ready to bring the schooner about in order to give the crew an opportunity to shorten sail.

Captain Candage, deposed as autocrat for the moment, seemed to be uncertain as to his duties.

Mayo, understanding mariner nature, felt some contrition and was prompted by saner second thought.

“You'd better take the wheel, Captain Candage. You know her tricks better than I do in a seaway. I'll help the boys take in sail.”

The master obeyed with alacrity. He seemed to be cowed. Anger no longer blinded him to their predicament.

“Just say what you want done, and I'll try to do it,” he told Mayo, in a voice which had become suddenly mild and rather beseeching. Then he called to his daughter, who had come to the foot of the companion steps, “Better blow out that cabin light, Polly girl! She's li'ble to dance bad, and we don't want to run the chance of fire.”

Mayo got a glimpse at her face as he hurried upon the house on his way to the main halyards. Her face was pale, but there was the firm spirit of her Yankee ancestry of the sea in her poise and in her very silence in that crisis. She obeyed without complaint or question and the cabin was dark; even the glimmer of the light had held something of cheer. Now the gloom was somber and depressing.

The schooner came round with a sort of scared hurry when the master threw the wheel hard over and trod on the spokes with all his weight. As soon as the bellying mainsail began to flap, the three men let it go on the run. They kept up the jumbo sail, as the main jib is called; they reefed the foresail down to its smallest compass.

Mayo, young, nimble, and eager, singly knotted more reef points than both his helpers together, and his crisp commands were obeyed unquestioningly.

“He sartinly is chain lightning in pants,” confided Dolph to Otie.

“He knows his card,” said Otie to Dolph.

Captain Mayo led the way aft, crawling over the shingles and laths.

“I hope it's your judgment, sir, that we'd better keep her into the wind as she is and try to ride this thing out,” he suggested to the master.

“It is my judgment, sir,” returned Captain Candage, with official gravity.

Hove to, the old _Polly_ rode in fairly comfortable style. She was deep with her load of lumber, but the lumber made her buoyant and she lifted easily. Her breadth of beam helped to steady her in the sweeping seas--but Captain Mayo clung to a mainstay and faced the wind and the driving rain and knew that the open Atlantic was no place for the _Polly_ on a night like that.

Spume from the crested breakers at her wallowing bow salted the rain on his dripping face. It was an unseasonable tempest, scarcely to be looked for at that time of year. But he had had frequent experience with the vagaries of easterlies, and he knew that a summer easterly, when it comes, holds menacing possibilities.

“They knowed how to build schooners when your old sirs built this one at Mayoport,” declared Captain Candage, trying to put a conciliatory tone into his voice when he bellowed against the blast. “She'll live where one of these fancy yachts of twice her size would be smothered.”

Mayo did not answer. He leaped upon the house and helped Dolph and Otie furl the mainsail that lay sprawled in the lazy-jaeks. They took their time; the more imminent danger seemed to be over.

“I never knowed a summer blow to amount to much,” observed Mr. Speed, trying to perk up, though he was hanging on by both hands to avoid bring blown off the slippery house.

“It depends on whether there's an extra special squall knotted into it somewhere to windward,” said Mayo, in a lull of the wind. “Then it can amount to a devil of a lot, Mr. Speed!”

The schooner washed her nose in a curving billow that came inboard and swept aft. With her small area of exposed sail and with the wind buffeting her, she had halted and paid off, lacking steerageway. She got several wallops of the same sort before she had gathered herself enough to head into the wind.

Again she paid off, as if trying to avoid a volleying gust, and another wave crested itself ahead of the blunt bows and then seemed to explode, dropping tons of water on deck. Laths, lumber, and bunches of shingles were ripped loose and went into the sea. The _Polly_ appeared to be showing sagacity of her own in that crisis; she was jettisoning cargo for her own salvation.

“Good Cephas! this is going to lose us our decklo'd,” wailed the master. “We'd better let her run!” “Don't you do it, sir! You'll never get her about!” Mayo had given over his work on the sail and was listening. Above the scream of the passing gusts which assailed him he was hearing a dull and solemn roar to windward. He suspected what that sound indicated. He had heard it before in his experience. He tried to peer into the driving storm, dragging the rain from his eyes with his fingers. Then nature held a torch for him. A vivid shaft of lightning crinkled overhead and spread a broad flare of illumination across the sea. His suspicions, which had been stirred by that sullen roar, were now verified. He saw a low wall of white water, rolling and frothing. It was a summer “spitter” trampling the waves.

A spitter is a freak in a regular tempest--a midsummer madness of weather upheaval. It is a thunderbolt of wind, a concentration of gale, a whirling dervish of disaster--wind compactly bunched into one almighty blast--wind enough to last a regular gale for a whole day if the stock were spent thriftily.

“Don't ease her an inch!” screamed Mayo.

But just then another surging sea climbed aboard and picked up more of the laths and more of the shingles, and frolicked away into the night with the plunder. Captain Candage's sense of thrift got a more vital jab than did his sense of fear. His eyes were on his wheel, and he had not seen the wall of white spume.

“That decklo'd has got to be lashed,” he muttered. He decided to run with the wind till that work could be performed. He threw his helm hard over. Mayo had been riding the main boom astraddle, hitching himself toward the captain, to make him hear. When the volunteer saw the master of the _Polly_ trying to turn tail to the foe in that fashion, he leaped to the wheel, but he was too late. The schooner had paid off too much. The yelling spitter caught them as they were poised broadside on the top of a wave, before the sluggish craft had made her full turn.

What happened then might have served as confirmation of mariners' superstition that a veritable demon reigns in the heart of the tempest. The attack on the old _Polly_ showed devilish intelligence in team-work. A crashing curler took advantage of the loosened deckload and smashed the schooner a longside buffet which sent all the lumber in a sliding drive against the lee rail and rigging. The mainsail had been only partly secured; the spitter blew into the flapping canvas with all its force and the sail snapped free and bellied out.

The next instant the _Polly_ was tripped!

She went over with all the helpless, dead-weight violence of a man who has caught his toe on a drooping clothes line in the dark.

The four men who were on deck were sailors and they did not need orders when they felt that soul-sickening swing of her as she toppled. Instinctively, with one accord, they dived for the cabin companionway.

Undoubtedly, as a sailor, the first thought of each was that the schooner was going on to her beam-ends. Therefore, to remain on deck meant that they would either slide into the water or that a smashing wave would carry them off.

They went tumbling down together in the darkness, and all four of them, with impulse of preservation as instant and true as that of the trap-door spider, set their hands to the closing of the hatch and the folding leaves of the door.

Captain Mayo, his clutch still on a knob, found himself pulled under water without understanding at first just what had happened. He let go his grip and came up to the surface, spouting. He heard the girl shriek in extremity of terror, so near him that her breath swept his face. He put out his arm and caught her while he was floundering for a footing. When he found something on which to stand and had steadied himself, he could not comprehend just what had happened; the floor he was standing on had queer irregularities.

“We've gone over!” squalled Mr. Speed in the black darkness. “We've gone clear over. We're upside down. We're standing on the ceiling!”

Then Mayo trod about a bit and convinced himself that the irregularities under his feet were the beams and carlines.

The _Polly_ had been tripped in good earnest! Mr. Speed was right--she was squarely upside down!

Even in that moment of stress Mayo could figure out how it had happened. The spitter must have ripped all her rotten canvas off her spars as she rolled and there had been no brace to hold her on her beam-ends when she went over.