Chapter 17

"Well, they done it all right--and they done it pretty slick, so far as I could see," interjected Hiram.

"Done it!" sneered the Cap'n. "Eased sheets here in this puddle, in a breeze about stiff enough to winnow oats! Supposin' it was a blow, with a gallopin' sea! Me runnin' around this deck taggin' gool on halyards, lifts, sheets, and downhauls, and them hoss-marines follerin' me up. Davy Jones would die laughin', unless some one pounded him on the back to help him get his breath."

Now that his mariner's nose was turned toward the sea once again after his two years of landsman's hebetude, all his seaman's instinct, all his seaman's caution, revived. His nose snuffed the air, his eyes studied the whirls of the floating clouds. There was nothing especially ominous in sight.

The autumn sun was warm. The wind was sprightly but not heavy. And yet his mariner's sense sniffed something untoward.

The _Dobson_, little topmast hooker, age-worn and long before relegated to the use of Sunday fishing-parties "down the bay," had for barometer only a broken affair that had been issued to advertise the virtues of a certain baking-powder. It was roiled permanently to the degree marked "Tornado."

"Yes," remarked Hiram, nestling down once more under the bulwark, after viewing the display of amateur activity, "of course, if you're afraid to tackle a little deep water once more, just for the sake of an outin', then I've no more to say. I've heard of railro'd engineers and sea-capt'ns losin' their nerve. I didn't know but it had happened to you."

"Well, it ain't," snapped the Cap'n, indignantly. And yet his sailor instinct scented menace. He couldn't explain it to that cynical old circus-man, intent on a day's outing. Had it not been for Hiram's presence and his taunt, Cap'n Sproul would have promptly turned tail to the Atlantic and taken his safe and certain way along the reaches and under shelter of the islands. But reflecting that Hiram Look, back in Smyrna, might circulate good-natured derogation of his mariner's courage, Cap'n Sproul set the _Dobson's_ blunt nose to the heave of the sea, and would not have quailed before a tidal wave.

The Smyrna contingent hailed this adventuring into greater depths as a guarantee of bigger fish for the salt-barrel at home, and proceeded to cut bait with vigor and pleased anticipation.

Only the Cap'n was saturnine, and even lost his interest in the animated figures on distant Cod Lead Nubble, though Hiram could not drag his eyes from them, seeing in their frantic gestures the denouement of his plot.

Shortly after noon they were well out to sea, still on the port tack, the swells swinging underneath in a way that soothed the men of Smyrna rather than worried them. So steady was the lift and sweep of the long roll that they gave over fishing and snored wholesomely in the sun on deck. Hiram dozed over his cigar, having paid zestful attention to the dinner that Jackson Denslow had spread in the galley.

Only Cap'n Sproul, at the wheel, was alert and awake. With some misgivings he noted that the trawl fishers were skimming toward port in their Hampton boats. A number of smackmen followed these. Later he saw several deeply laden Scotiamen lumbering past on the starboard tack, all apparently intent on making harbor.

"Them fellers has smelt something outside that don't smell good," grunted the Cap'n. But he still stood on his way. "I reckon I've got softenin' of the brain," he muttered; "livin' inshore has given it to me. 'Cause if I was in my right senses I'd be runnin' a race with them fellers to see which would get inside Bug Light and to a safe anchorage first. And yet I'm standin' on with this old bailin'-dish because I'm afraid of what a landlubber will say to folks in Smyrna about my bein' a coward, and with no way of my provin' that I ain't. All that them hoss-marines has got a nose for is a b'iled dinner when it's ready. They couldn't smell nasty weather even if 'twas daubed onto their mustaches."

At the end of another hour, during which the crew of the _Dobson_ had become thoroughly awake and aware of the fact that the coast-line was only a blue thread on the northern horizon, Cap'n Sproul had completely satisfied his suspicions as to a certain bunch of slaty cloud.

There was a blow in it--a coming shift of wind preceded by flaws that made the Cap'n knot his eyebrows dubiously.

"There!" he blurted, turning his gaze on Hiram, perched on the grating. "If you reckon you've got enough of a sail out of this, we'll put about for harbor. But I want it distinctly understood that I ain't sayin' the word 'enough.' I'd keep on sailin' to the West Injies if we had grub a-plenty to last us."

"There ain't grub enough," suggested Jackson Denslow, who came up from the waist with calm disregard of shipboard etiquette. "The boys have all caught plenty of fish, and we want to get in before dark. So gee her round, Cap'n."

"Don't you give off no orders to me!" roared the Cap'n. "Go back for'ard where you belong."

"That's the sense of the boys, just the same," retorted Denslow, retreating a couple of steps. "'Delphus Murray is seasick, and two or three of the boys are gettin' so. We ain't enlisted for no seafarin' trip."

"Don't you realize that we're on the high seas now and that you're talkin' mutiny, and that mutiny's a state-prison crime?" clamored the irate skipper. "I'd have killed a Portygee for sayin' a quarter as much. I'd have killed him for settin' foot abaft the gratin'--killed him before he opened his mouth."

"We ain't Portygees," rejoined Denslow, stubbornly. "We ain't no sailors."

"Nor I ain't liar enough to call you sailors," the Cap'n cried, in scornful fury.

"If ye want to come right down to straight business," said the refractory Denslow, "there ain't any man got authority over us except Mr. Look there, as foreman of the Smyrna Ancients and Honer'bles."

Mr. Denslow, mistaking the Cap'n's speechlessness for conviction, proceeded:

"We was hired to take a sail for our health, dig dirt, and keep our mouths shut. Same has been done and is bein' done--except in so far as we open 'em to remark that we want to get back onto dry ground."

Hiram noted that the Cap'n's trembling hands were taking a half-hitch with a rope's end about a tiller-spoke. He understood this as meaning that Cap'n Sproul desired to have his hands free for a moment. He hastened to interpose.

"We're goin' to start right back, Denslow. You can tell the boys for me."

"All right, Chief!" said the faithful member of the Ancients, and departed.

"We be goin' back, hey?" The Cap'n had his voice again, and turned on Hiram a face mottled with fury. "This firemen's muster is runnin' this craft, is it? Say, look-a-here, Hiram, there are certain things 'board ship where it's hands off! There is a certain place where friendship ceases. You can run your Smyrna fire department on shore, but aboard a vessel where I'm master mariner, by the wall-eyed jeehookibus, there's no man but me bosses! And so long as a sail is up and her keel is movin' I say the say!"

In order to shake both fists under Hiram's nose, he had surrendered the wheel to the rope-end. The _Dobson_ paid off rapidly, driven by a sudden squall that sent her lee rail level with the foaming water. Those forward howled in concert. Even the showman's face grew pale as he squatted in the gangway, clutching the house for support.

"Cut away them ropes! She's goin' to tip over!" squalled Murray, the big blacksmith. Between the two options--to take the wheel and bring the clumsy hooker into the wind, or to rush forward and flail his bunglers away from the rigging--Cap'n Sproul shuttled insanely, rushing to and fro and bellowing furious language. The language had no effect. With axes and knives the willing crew hacked away every rope forward that seemed to be anything supporting a sail, and down came the foresail and two jibs. The Cap'n knocked down the two men who tried to cut the mainsail halyards. The next moment the _Dobson_ jibed under the impulse of the mainsail, and the swinging boom snapped Hiram's plug hat afar into the sea, and left the showman flat on his back, dizzily rubbing a bump on his bald head.

For an instant Cap'n Sproul was moved by a wild impulse to let her slat her way to complete destruction, but the sailorman's instinct triumphed, and he worked her round, chewing a strand of his beard with venom.

"I don't pretend to know as much about ship managin' as you do," Hiram ventured to say at last, "but if that wa'n't a careless performance, lettin' her wale round that way, then I'm no judge."

He got no comment from the Cap'n.

"I don't suppose it's shipshape to cut ropes instead of untie 'em," pursued Hiram, struggling with lame apology in behalf of the others, "but I could see for myself that if them sails stayed up we were goin' to tip over. It's better to sail a little slower and keep right side up."

He knotted a big handkerchief around his head and took his place on the grating once more.

"What can we do now?" bawled Murray.

"You're the one that's issuin' orders 'board here now," growled the Cap'n, bending baleful gaze on the foreman of the Ancients. "Go for'ard and tell 'em to chop down both masts, and then bore some holes in the bottom to let out the bilge-water. Then they can set her on fire. There might be something them blasted Ancients could do to a vessel on fire."

"I don't believe in bein' sarcastic when people are tryin' to do the best they can," objected Hiram. He noted that the _Dobson_ was once again setting straight out to sea. She was butting her snub nose furiously into swelling combers. The slaty bench of clouds had lifted into the zenith. Scud trailed just over the swaying masts. The shore line was lost in haze. "Don't be stuffy any longer, Cap'n," he pleaded. "We've gone fur enough. I give up. You are deep-water, all right!"

Cap'n Sproul made no reply. Suddenly catching a moment that seemed favorable, he lashed the wheel, and with mighty puffing and grunting "inched" in the main-sheet. "She ought to have a double reef," he muttered. "But them petrified sons of secos couldn't take in a week's wash."

"You can see for yourself that the boys are seasick," resumed Hiram, when the Cap'n took the wheel again. "If you don't turn 'round--"

"Mr. Look," grated the skipper, "I've got just a word or two to say right now." His sturdy legs were straddled, his brown hands clutched the spokes of the weather-worn wheel. "I'm runnin' this packet from now on, and it's without conversation. Understand? Don't you open your yap. And you go for'ard and tell them steer calves that I'll kill the first one that steps foot aft the mainmast."

There was that in the tones and in the skipper's mien of dignity as he stood there, fronting and defying once again his ancient foe, the ocean, which took out of Hiram all his courage to retort. And after a time he went forward, dragging himself cautiously, to join the little group of misery huddled in the folds of the fallen canvas.

"A cargo of fools to save!" growled Cap'n Sproul, his eyebrows knotted in anxiety. "Myself among 'em! And they don't know what the matter is with 'em. We've struck the line gale--that's what we've done! Struck it with a choppin'-tray for a bo't and a mess of rooty-baggy turnips for a crew! And there's only one hole to crawl out of."

XXII

The wind had shifted when it settled into the blow--a fact that the Cap'n's shipmates did not realize, and which he was too disgusted by their general inefficiency to explain to them. In his crippled condition, in the gathering night, he figured that it would be impossible for him to make Portland harbor, the only accessible refuge. The one chance was to ride it out, and this he set himself to do, grimly silent, contemptuously reticent. He held her nose up to the open sea, allowing her only steerageway, the gale slithering off her flattened sail.

The men who gazed on him from the waist saw in his resolution only stubborn determination to punish them.

"He's sartinly the obstinatest man that ever lowered his head at ye," said Zeburee Nute, breaking in on the apprehensive mumble of his fellows. "He won't stop at northin' when he's mad. Look what he's done in Smyrna. But I call this rubbin' it in a darn sight more'n he's got any right to do."

His lament ended in a seasick hiccough.

"I don't understand sailormen very well," observed Jackson Denslow; "and it may be that a lot of things they do are all right, viewed from sailorman standpoint. But if Cap Sproul wa'n't plumb crazy and off'm his nut them times we offered him honors in our town, and if he ain't jest as crazy now, I don't know lunatics when I see 'em."

"Headin' straight out to sea when dry ground's off that way," said Murray, finning feeble hand to starboard, "ain't what Dan'l Webster would do, with his intellect, if he was here."

Hiram Look sat among them without speaking, his eyes on his friend outlined against the gloom at the wheel. One after the other the miserable members of the Ancients and Honorables appealed to him for aid and counsel.

"Boys," he said at last, "I've been figgerin' that he's just madder'n blazes at what you done to the sails, and that as soon's he works his mad off he'll turn tail. Judgin' from what he said to me, it ain't safe to tackle him right away. It will only keep him mad. Hold tight for a little while and let's see what he'll do when he cools. And if he don't cool then, I've got quite a habit of gettin' mad myself."

And, hanging their hopes on this argument and promise, they crouched there in their misery, their eyes on the dim figure at the wheel, their ears open to the screech of the gale, their souls as sick within them as were their stomachs.

In that sea and that wind the progress of the _Dobson_ was, as the Cap'n mentally put it, a "sashay." There was way enough on her to hold her into the wind, but the waves and the tides lugged her slowly sideways and backward. And yet, with their present sea-room Cap'n Sproul hoped that he might claw off enough to save her.

Upon his absorption in these hopes blundered Hiram through the night, crawling aft on his hands and knees after final and despairing appeal from his men.

"I say, Cap'n," he gasped, "you and I have been too good friends to have this go any further. I've took my medicine. So have the boys. Now let's shake hands and go ashore."

No reply from the desperate mariner at the wheel battling for life.

"You heard me!" cried Hiram, fear and anger rasping in his tones. "I say, I want to go ashore, and, damme, I'm goin'!"

"Take your shoes in your hand and wade," gritted the Cap'n. "I ain't stoppin' you." He still scorned to explain to the meddlesome landsman.

"I can carry a grudge myself," blustered Hiram. "But I finally stop to think of others that's dependent on me. We've got wives ashore, you and me have, and these men has got families dependent on 'em. I tell ye to turn round and go ashore!"

"Turn round, you devilish idjit?" bellowed the Cap'n. "What do you think this is--one of your circus wagons with a span of hosses hitched in front of it? I told you once before that I didn't want to be bothered with conversation. I tell you so ag'in. I've got things on my mind that you don't know anything about, and that you ain't got intellect enough to understand. Now, you shut up or I'll kick you overboard for a mutineer."

At the end of half an hour of silence--bitter, suffering silence--Hiram broke out with a husky shout.

"There ye go, Cap'n," he cried. "Behind you! There's our chance!"

A wavering red flare lighted the sky, spreading upward on the mists.

The men forward raised a quavering cheer.

"Ain't you goin' to sail for it?" asked Hiram, eagerly. "There's our chance to get ashore." He had crept close to the skipper.

"I s'pose you feel like puttin' on that piazzy hat of yourn and grabbin' your speakin'-trumpet, leather buckets, and bed-wrench, and startin' for it," sneered Cap'n Sproul in a lull of the wind. "In the old times they had wimmen called sirens to coax men ashore. But that thing there seems to be better bait of the Smyrna fire department."

"Do you mean to tell me that you ain't agoin' to land when there's dry ground right over there, with people signallin' and waitin' to help you?" demanded the showman, his temper whetted by his fright.

The Cap'n esteemed the question too senseless to admit any reply except a scornful oath. He at the wheel, studying drift and wind, had pretty clear conception of their whereabouts. The scraggly ridge dimly outlined by the fire on shore could hardly be other than Cod Lead, where Colonel Gideon Ward and Eleazar Bodge were languishing. It was probable that those marooned gentlemen had lighted a fire in their desperation in order to signal for assistance. The Cap'n reflected that it was about as much wit as landsmen would possess.

To Hiram's panicky mind this situation seemed to call for one line of action. They were skippered by a madman or a brute, he could not figure which. At any rate, it seemed time to interfere.

He crawled back again to the huddled group of the Ancients and enlisted Ludelphus Murray, as biggest and least incapacitated by seasickness.

They staggered back in the gloom and, without preface or argument, fell upon the Cap'n, dragged him, fighting manfully and profanely, to the companionway of the little house, thrust him down, after an especially vigorous engagement of some minutes, slammed and bolted the doors and shot the hatch. They heard him beating about within and raging horribly, but Murray doubled himself over, his knees against the doors, his body prone on the hatch.

His position was fortunate for him, for again the _Dobson_ jibed, the boom of the mainsail slishing overhead. Hiram was crawling on hands and knees toward the wheel, and escaped, also. When the little schooner took the bit in her teeth she promptly eliminated the question of seamanship. It was as though she realized that the master-hand was paralyzed. She shook the rotten sail out of the bolt-ropes with a bang, righted and went sluggishly rolling toward the flare on shore.

"I don't know much about vessel managin'," gasped Hiram, "but seein' that gettin' ashore was what I was drivin' at; the thing seems to be progressin' all favorable."

Up to this time one passenger on the schooner appeared to be taking calm or tempest with the same equanimity. This passenger was Imogene, couched at the break of the little poop. But the cracking report of the bursting sail, and now the dreadful clamor of the imprisoned Cap'n Sproul, stirred her fears. She raised her trunk and trumpeted with bellowings that shamed the blast.

"Let him up now, 'Delphus!" shouted Hiram, after twirling the wheel vainly and finding that the _Dobson_ heeded it not. "If there ain't no sails up he can't take us out to sea. Let him up before he gives Imogene hysterics."

And when Murray released his clutch on the hatch it snapped back, and out over the closed doors of the companionway shot the Cap'n, a whiskered jack-in-the-box, gifted with vociferous speech.

Like the cautious seaman, his first glance was aloft. Then he spun the useless wheel.

"You whelps of perdition!" he shrieked. "Lifts cut, mains'l blowed out, and a lee shore a quarter of a mile away! I've knowed fools, lunatics, and idjits, and I don't want to insult 'em by callin' you them names. You--"

"Well, if we are any crazier for wantin' to go ashore where we belong than you was for settin' out to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a night like this, I'd like to have it stated why," declared Hiram.

"Don't you know enough to understand that I was tryin' to save your lives by ratchin' her off'm this coast?" bellowed Cap'n Sproul.

"Just thought you was crazy, and think so now," replied the showman, now fully as furious as the Cap'n--each in his own mind accusing the other of being responsible for their present plight. "The place for us is on shore, and we're goin' there!"

"What do you suppose is goin' to become of us when she strikes?" bawled the Cap'n, clutching the backstay and leaning into the night.

"She'll strike shore, won't she? Well, that's what I want to strike. It'll sound good and feel good."

For such gibbering lunacy as this the master mariner had no fit reply. His jaws worked wordlessly. He kept his clutch on the backstay with the dizzy notion that this saved him from clutching some one's throat.

"You'd better begin to pray, you fellers," he cried at last, with a quaver in his tones. "We're goin' smash-ti-belter onto them rocks, and Davy Jones is settin' on extra plates for eight at breakfast to-morrer mornin'. Do your prayin' now."

"The only Scripture that occurs to me just now," said Hiram, in a hush of the gale, "is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.'"

That was veritably a Delphic utterance at that moment, had Hiram only known it.

Some one has suggested that there is a providence that watches over children and fools. It is certain that chance does play strange antics. Men have fallen from balloons and lived. Other men have slipped on a banana skin and died. Men have fought to save themselves from destruction, and have been destroyed. Other men have resigned themselves and have won out triumphantly.

The doomed _Dobson_ was swashing toward the roaring shore broadside on. The first ledge would roll her bottom up, beating in her punky breast at the same time. This was the programme the doleful skipper had pictured in his mind. There was no way of winning a chance through the rocks, such as there might have been with steerageway, a tenuous chance, and yet a chance. But the Cap'n decided with apathy and resignation to fate that one man could not raise a sail out of that wreck forward and at the same time heave her up to a course for the sake of that chance.

As to Imogene he had not reckoned.

Perhaps that faithful pachyderm decided to die with her master embraced in her trunk. Perhaps she decided that the quarter-deck was farther above water than the waist.

At any rate, curving back her trunk and "roomping" out the perturbation of her spirit, she reared on her hind-legs, boosted herself upon the roof of the house, and clawed aft. This auto-shifting of cargo lifted the bow of the little schooner. Her jibs, swashing soggily about her bow, were hoisted out of the water, and a gust bellied them. On the pivot of her buried stern the _Dobson_ swung like a top just as twin ledges threatened her broadside, and she danced gayly between them, the wind tugging her along by her far-flung jibs.

In matter of wrecks, it is the outer rocks that smash; it is the teeth of these ledges that tear timbers and macerate men. The straggling remains are found later in the sandy cove.

But with Imogene as unwitting master mariner in the crisis, the schooner dodged the danger of the ledges by the skin of her barnacled bottom, spun frothing up the cove in the yeast of the waves, bumped half a dozen times as though searching suitable spot for self-immolation, and at last, finding a bed of white sand, flattened herself upon it with a racket of demolition--the squall of drawing spikes her death-wail, the boom of water under her bursting deck her grunt of dissolution.

The compelling impulse that drives men to close personal contact in times of danger had assembled all the crew of the schooner upon the poop, the distracted Imogene in the centre. She wore the trappings of servitude--the rude harness in which she had labored to draw up the buckets of dirt on Cod Lead, the straps to which the tackle had been fastened to hoist her on board the _Dobson_.

When the deck went out from under them, the elephant was the biggest thing left in reach.