Part 2

Scowling at the jolly company as he passed them, Valentine caught a new note of earnestness in the captain's voice and stopped to listen:

"It may not be wrong after all, now that you are all urging me, and I will cut it short. God has been very good to me, and in my poor way I try to bear witness. And you may understand when I tell you what happened in '67 when I was battering around the fo'ksle of a deep-water ship out of Baltimore. Never will I forget the night when----"

The words produced an extraordinary effect upon Valentine. Blind anger seized him. He could see nothing else than that the captain was defying his written order, the passengers abetting him, and the whole group making a mockery of his authoritative judgment. He brushed in among the listeners, and shouted in a gusty treble:

"This has got to stop, I tell you. What did I write you, Captain Kendrick, about all this religious tommy-rot? I'll show you whose orders go on this ship."

The company scattered as if a bomb had lit in the midst of it as Captain Kendrick took two strides, whipped out a long arm and grasped Valentine by the shoulder:

"No man gives me orders on the deck of my ship at sea. Do you want to go below in irons? Who are----"

"My name is A. H. Valentine, and I threatened to kick you out of your berth two weeks ago, and you know it," screamed the struggling young man. "Turn me loose, I tell you. Pension be hanged. Now you can go ashore and rot. I own this ship and a dozen like her. I'll put the first officer in command to-day, and it's high time, too. He deserves it, and I know why he lost his promotion."

"I don't care if you're the Emperor of Chiny. Put a stopper on that tongue of yours, or--" Captain Kendrick checked his hot words and looked at the agitated young man like a pitying father. "You don't know any better, do you? We'll talk it all over ashore. But not at sea, understand--not at sea."

Captain Kendrick walked slowly toward his room without looking back, and sent word for Mr. Parlin to come to him at once. The mate breezed in with hearty salutation, but his high color paled a little when he looked squarely at the captain's flinty face.

"Stand on your two feet like a man, Mr. Parlin, for you're before your commander. Have you been telling lies to a passenger named Valentine?"

"Didn't know Mr. Valentine was aboard, sir. Wouldn't know him if he was sitting there in your chair. Are you trying to insult me?"

"Could I insult a slush-bucket?" thundered the captain. "You have been talking to Mr. Valentine. Don't spit out the lie that's on the tip of your tongue. Two years ago, I found you asleep on watch. At other times you have been slack and inefficient. I reported you every time. That's why you've seen three mates go over your head and get their ships. If I'd had my way you'd have been disrated or thrown on the beach. But you worked wires ashore, you harpooned me in the back, and you held your berth instead of being kicked out for a better man."

The mate's face was purple as he stammered:

"I haven't said anything against you, sir."

"If you're trying to work up into the wind with Mr. Valentine, you wait until you get ashore," growled the captain. "This is my ship until she docks. You can't say I ever tried to convert you to God. He doesn't want jelly-fish. He wants men."

Driven into a corner, the mate tried to take the aggressive in a burst of defiance:

"I guess that what Mr. Valentine says goes. I'll see that he hears my side of the case before sundown."

Mr. Parlin had gone too far, and he knew it before he had bitten off his empty words. Captain Kendrick jumped to his feet, and his beard was pushed within an inch of Mr. Parlin's bulbous nose:

"You're disrated now. Mr. Carr takes your berth until we make port. Get for'ard, you mutinous loafer."

"Get nothin'!" yelled Mr. Parlin. "I'm going aft to see the real boss."

Two hairy hands clamped down on his shoulders, and he was swung clear of the deck. Then his heavily shod toes beat an intermittent tattoo over the sill and along the planks, as he was hauled and shoved toward his own room. The captain shifted his burden until the mate was tucked under one arm, breathless, impotent, trickling juicy curses. He was dumped inside and heard the heavy storm-door slam and the click of a turning key before he could heave himself to his feet and hammer the barricade in useless rage until his fists bled.

IV

Captain Kendrick had no more time to bother with such trifles as the outbreak of Valentine. Before this day had darkened the sky turned a dirty yellow, and the weight of the wind was not enough to account for the greasy, sluggish roll of the sea. The barometer needle slid unwaveringly toward the danger point, and after some uncertain shifting, the wind hauled to the northeast and grew steadily colder. Stripped of all superfluous gear on deck, the _Suwannee_ was licked into fighting trim, gaunt, streaming and naked. The weeping drizzle that fogged the sky line changed to sleet, and soon after dusk came blinding snow with a great fury of wind.

When the captain faced the storm on his quivering bridge, he felt as if all breath and warmth were instantly blown out of him. No fleecy snowflakes these, but hooting volleys of icy shot, incessantly delivered. He groped along the canvased rail in a choking fight for breath until he found Mr. Carr. They gasped and flinched as they vainly tried to peer into the whirling smother.

The sea rose with incredible swiftness. Within the hour, the _Suwannee_ could no longer be held on her course. Yawing wildly whenever a vicious onset of the sea smashed against her quarter and toppled on deck, the ship was brought round and hove to, dead into it. Then the racing of her screws shook her until it seemed as if the engines would tear her hull apart, and speed was slowed as much as the captain dared.

Mr. Parlin was still locked in his stateroom, and as the deep-laden _Suwannee_ wrestled with the blizzard, Captain Kendrick argued in his mind whether the mutinous officer should be released at a time when all hands were sorely needed. The third officer had not been long enough promoted to shoulder any grave responsibility. In such a night as this, whose menace was hourly increasing, the vital issue was to safeguard the ship. But the captain's manhood rebelled against a compromise with his deed of clean-cut justice. And rankling in his heart was a damnable phrase, "prime of usefulness is past." It helped to give him the strength of two, now that the test had come, and he decided to fight it through with Peter Carr.

Before midnight the cold was so benumbing and deadly, without chance of respite, that freezing fast to the rail to which they clung was a fate that threatened master and mate. Each begged the other to seek a little warmth and shelter, and their indomitable wills were dead-locked time and again. At length the captain put it as a most emphatic command, and fairly hustled Peter Carr down the steps to the steam-heated wheelhouse. When the mate returned, hot with coffee and protestations that the captain take a turn below, the old man refused with a passionate gesture of finality.

Although he had striven to bank the fires of resentment, his thoughts burned like coals that callow youth, sitting in judgment, should have flung aside his faith and works together like so much trash. But never for a moment did such introspections relax his alert understanding of every symptom of the laboring tussle between ship and sea. So far she had come unhurt. Now, once, as she climbed wearily and hung for an instant like a giant see-saw, Captain Kendrick became tensely expectant as he felt through the planking a strange jarring break, somewhere down in her vitals.

Then, instead of splendidly crashing down the long slope into the hidden wrath of water, the _Suwannee_ began to swing broadside as if on a pivot. The wild impulse was unchecked, even as her bow slanted into the tumbling barrier, and heaving far down to port, she rolled helpless and exposed, as a bewildered boxer drops the guard that shields his jaw from the knock-out blow.

"_Hard over, hard over_," yelled the captain down the tube to an empty wheelhouse, for a pallid quartermaster darted from within, and scrambled to the bridge, shouting:

"She won't steer, ---- ---- her, she won't steer. The gear has carried away below."

With one look to windward, the captain crawled to the engine-room indicator and sent clamoring signals to reverse the port and jam full speed ahead with the starboard screw. But before the _Suwannee_ could feel the altered drive of her engines, so huge a sea raced over her lurching bow that the port side of the bridge crumpled under the attack like a wire bird-cage smashed with a club. Roaring aft, the gray flood ripped a string of boats from their lashings. It left their fragments absurdly dangling from the twisted davits, and poured through the cabin skylights, whose strength collapsed like pasteboard.

Peter Carr had seen the danger in time to shout a warning as he fled to the starboard end of the bridge. On top of him came the captain, washed along in a tangle of splintered oak and canvas. The mate crawled from beneath and looked for the quartermaster. A sodden bundle of oil-skins was doubled around a stanchion almost at his feet, and life was gone from the battered features. Instinctively glancing seaward, the mate noted that the _Suwannee_ had responded to the send of her screws, and was veering now to port. He signaled to ease her, and as she headed into it again, he made a rush and dragged the skipper clear. The sleeted beard was matted with blood, but the old man stirred and opened his eyes.

"We've got to nurse her along with the engines," he muttered brokenly. "Thank God for twin screws. Stand by the indicator. Sing down for hands to clear the wreckage, and overhaul the steering-gear. It felt to me like the rudder went at the pintles. But have 'em man the hand-wheel aft."

He wiped the blood from his eyes, and strove to get on his feet. One leg gave way, and he hauled himself up by gripping what was left of the rail.

"It's gone back on me again," he groaned, "but it wasn't much of a leg at best. Lend a hand, and do as I tell ye."

Peter Carr passed a lashing around the skipper's waist, and so made him fast to the steel pillar of the engine-room indicator. Now began the infinitely wary coaxing of the ship to face the storm, now with a thrust of her port screw, again with a kick of her starboard screw. It was thus she must be steered, for word came up that there was no mending the damage this side of port. The mate was afraid to take over the task of keeping the ship headed into the storm, for this was his first experience in a twin-screw steamer, yet he was as much afraid that the skipper might die if he left him where he was.

The ship fought to wrest herself free from this shifting grip, she seemed eager to slay herself by swinging to take the seas abeam, but the man whose face and beard were dappled with blotches of crimson held her hove to, as if his soul had pervaded her clanking depths. When Peter Carr implored him to have his hurts cared for, the captain answered with such shattered murmurings as these, for the cold and the pain were biting into his brain:

"But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.... Let not the water-flood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up.... Oh, spare me that I may recover strength before I go hence and be no more.... Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them out of their distress...."

Peter Carr was a much younger man, and the violence of his exertions had so warmed his blood that he had much strength left in him. Now and then he tugged at the captain's arm, shouted in his ear, tried to lift him, and the third officer, who had come from the task of mending matters on deck, joined the heroic struggle. The captain awoke to chide them as if they were impatient boys, but his eyes saw only the swirling curtain of snow ahead and the great seas he must meet in their teeth. Suddenly he tried to stand erect, and shouted as he swayed:

"Vessel dead ahead."

With the words, he sent a signal to his engine-room, and the _Suwannee_ shouldered the merest trifle off to port just as a great gray mass slid past, so close that the watchers smelled a whiff of steam. The blackness was beginning to fade out of the storm, day was breaking, and they glimpsed alongside a cluster of jackies toiling in flooding seas at hawsers lashed round two great turret guns. More than ever convinced by this escape that his eyes were needed on the bridge, Captain Kendrick stayed steadfast in his purpose. The two officers felt awe as they looked at him, that he should have sensed, where their eyes could not see, the danger they had shaved by a hair's breadth. Sometimes now his head fell forward, but the hand on the indicator lever was ever nervously alive to feel the ship and the raving seas, and he was snatching her from death, inch by inch and hour by hour.

V

In the early hours of the storm, Arthur Valentine was battering like a shuttle-cock between the sides of his berth, sicker in mind than in body, for manifold terrors had come to prey upon him. Without confidence in the captain of the ship, he felt that his own cowardice was responsible for failure to act when the issue had been almost within his grasp. Through the dragging hours, as the ship cried aloud in every racking beam and rivet, or quaked as if her rearing bows had rammed a rock, Valentine convinced himself that the captain would not have dared refuse him if he had faced it out and insisted that the first officer take command.

"Don't I own the steamer?" he groaned. "Can't a man do what he pleases with his own property? And I let myself be bluffed out like a whipped pup. Only a lunatic would have defied me. Of course he's tucked away in a corner trying to pray down a storm like this. What did Carr tell me? What did Parlin say?"

On the heels of these emotions came the dreadful instant when the _Suwannee_ took aboard the sea that swept her bridge. Valentine was flung out of his berth to the floor in a bruised heap, and heard the crash of glass and the riot of water which tumbled solid into the saloon outside his room. Before he could get footing his room was awash, and floating luggage knocked him this way and that. He crawled outside and collided with a half-clad man who was wringing his hands as he wailed:

"Save yourself. We're sinking. Look at the whole Atlantic Ocean in here."

"What's the matter? What's happened?" gasped Valentine.

"What's happened? I heard the captain had killed the first officer, or strung him up, or something awful. And now there surely is hell to pay. Why don't somebody come to our rescue?"

What passed with him for duty, even the high tide of heroic impulse in his whole life, impelled Valentine to struggle up the stairway to the "social hall" on the deck above. He believed that the risk of being washed overboard was very great, he was almost certain the crazy captain would knock him down or shoot him, but he was braced ready to meet these things. It was a desperate situation demanding a desperate remedy. He felt vague admiration and pity for himself, as he made ready for the plunge on deck. But a dripping sailor barred the way.

"I'm willing to run the risk," protested the hero. "It's my duty to save the ship. She belongs to me."

"So does Cape Horn an' the Statue of Liberty," returned the seaman soothingly. "But you don't want to play with 'em now. They'll keep all right. Nobody goes on deck. Them's orders. Just sit down an' play you're a train of cars. It's lots of fun, an' it's safe an' dry."

Valentine tried to pass him and was thrust back so violently that he fell upon a comatose passenger stretched on a set-tee. This victim sputtered feeble protest and other voices were raised. Valentine noticed now that several men and women were huddled in this corner of the deck-house, fled from the desolation below stairs. One of them screamed above the clamor of the wind:

"The ship is all smashed to pieces and nobody knows what to do next."

"I am going to get forward somehow, and put the first officer in command, if he's alive," cried Valentine. "It's life or death for all of us, and my word must go. Doesn't this fool sailor know who I am?"

Alas, these shivering refugees scented a new alarm. The poor young man had gone mad with fright, and they, too, tried to soothe him, while a woman of them sobbingly implored the sailor to take him away before he became violent. Valentine cursed them all, and clawed his way down the hand-rail to the saloon to seek some other exit. The way forward was blocked by savage men dragging tarpaulins, and they kicked him out of their path when he would argue with them. He splashed back and forth, like a rat in a trap, falling against bulk-heads and furniture, or pitched clear off his feet, until, worn out, he slunk back in sullen silence up among the little company in the deck-house who waited for they knew not what.

So much of Valentine's purpose had been hammered out of him that nausea resumed its sway, and he clung to a cushion, helpless through interminable hours. When he was able to pull himself together and make feeble effort, it seemed as if the pitching of the steamer were less terrifying, and through an after-port the daylight gleamed. He dragged himself to it, and caught a glimpse of somber sea and sky. The blizzard had passed.

Then strong hands were thumping on the outer door, and a steward tugged at the inside fastenings. In a flurry of spray three burden-bearers staggered into the room, between them a great limp bulk in oil-skins, whose face was hidden by a sou'wester. As the seamen paused to veer ever so gently around the corner of the hallway, Valentine went close to the third officer who led the way, and said with a novel timidity in his voice:

"I am Mr. Valentine, owner of the line. Can you tell me what has happened, please?"

"It's the skipper--frozen up, busted up, dyin' it looks to me, sir," was the husky response. "He's brought her through the blow lone-handed. I never seen another man afloat as could ha' done the trick he did."

The young man trailed after the stumbling procession which turned into a large stateroom aft. Before swift hands had removed the boots and outer garments, a physician from among the passengers was busy with hot water and bandages. The Irish stewardess was weeping as she tried to help. They paid no heed to Valentine, who returned to the doorway as often as he was jostled to one side.

The three seamen huddled in the passage talked softly among themselves, and Valentine heard:

"I tink he give der first mate vat vas comin' to him, eh? Und if der skipper's room vas flooded out, den Mister Parlin must been sloshin' round mit der door gelocked, most drownded. Goot enough."

"It's sure all right if the old man done it. An' him with two bum legs to start with, buckin' her through last night. Him gettin' smashed galley-west, rudder busted--Hell's Delight! what a mess! He looked as if he was all in when we pried him loose from them slings that was holdin' him up."

"Ask the doc if he can pull him through, will you?"

Valentine tiptoed in, as the doctor whispered with a warning gesture:

"I think so. His head needs a good many stitches, and there is an ankle to set and some ribs to mend. But he will take a lot of killing yet. Come, men, you must clear out of the hall. He will be coming to presently."

What Valentine heard was mightily reinforced by that which he saw with eyes that were misty and troubled. Before him lay such grim reality of duty done as the shallows of his life had never touched. Groping in a welter of new thoughts, he made his way to the deck and went forward as far as he dared, amazed at sight of the havoc wrought overnight. Perched on his wrecked bridge the figure of Peter Carr swung against the brightening sky. He had learned who Valentine was, and called down:

"We'll work her up to Sandy Hook without any blisterin' salvage bills, sir. There's a few of us left."

"And these are the kind of men I was going to stand on their heads," said Valentine to himself, as he clambered up and asked many eager questions. Nor was Peter Carr at all backward in painting with vivid word and gesture the story of the night, down to a parting shaft of crafty comment:

"And there's them that thinks the old man is a softy an' ought to be knittin' tidies in a home for derelict seafarin' men."

Restlessly seeking the captain's stateroom again and again, Valentine was denied admittance until late in the afternoon. When the doctor let him in, the old man opened his eyes and his weather-scarred face lightened with a kindly gleam of recognition. Valentine flushed and began hurried speech:

"I hope you'll forget that letter.... Is there anything I can do?... If you want to go to sea again, or if you don't, or whatever else----"

The doctor raised a silencing finger. Valentine bent over to stroke a bandaged hand which moved on the blanket just enough to pat his with a little parental caress. The doctor nudged Valentine to withdraw, as the captain whispered drowsily:

"All-l's well.... You didn't know any better, did you?... So He bringeth them into their desired haven."

A VICTORY UNFORESEEN

"That's enough for to-night. Turn around and go home. You are a disgrace to Yale, all of you, and you're the worst of a bad lot, Number Five."

The Head Coach roared his convictions through a megaphone from the bow of the panting launch, and the coxswain caught up the words and flung them in piping echoes at the heads of the eight sullen oarsmen facing him. The grind of the slides and the tearing swash of blades abruptly ceased as the slim shell trailed with dying headway to the skitter of the resting oars. Backs burned dull red by the sun of long June days drooped in relaxation that was not all weariness. John Hastings, at Number Five, remembered when to slip along the shore; heading homeward in the twilight after pulling four miles over the New London course, was the keenest joy he had ever known. Now, with the Harvard race less than a week away, the daily toil was a nightmare of ineffective striving. The pulsating shell hesitated between strokes, it rolled without visible cause, and seemed sentiently to realize that the crew was rowing as eight men, not as one.

The boat circled wide and the men swept it listlessly toward the lights of the Quarters at Gales Ferry. They had just undergone the severest ordeal in all athletic training in their race against the stop watch, yet if the work had been good they would have finished vibrant as steel springs, spurting in this welcome home stretch like the sweep of a hawk. Squatted on the boathouse float a little later, dousing pails of water over his sweating shoulders, Hastings heard the Stroke growl to Number Seven:

"What's the matter with you loafers back there?"

"I'm not behind," retorted Seven, with hair-trigger irritability. "The trouble is in the middle of the boat. Hastings is too heavy to row in form this year, and he seems to have gone to pieces in the last month. That's where the worst break in the swing comes. Did you hear the Old Man threaten to take him out of the boat and get him a job as a farm hand?"