"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 pa.s.sing gusts which a.s.sailed 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"
superst.i.tion 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 k.n.o.b, 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.
Captain Candage was spouting, splashing near at hand, and was bellowing his fears. Then he began to call for his daughter in piteous fashion.
"Are you drownded, Polly darling?" he shouted.
"I have her safe, sir," Mayo a.s.sured him in husky tones, trying to clear the water from his throat. "Stand on a beam. You can get half of your body above water."
"It"s all off with us," gasped the master. "We"re spoke for."
Such utter and impenetrable blackness Mayo had never experienced before.
Their voices boomed dully, as if they were in a huge hogshead which had been headed over.
""Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,""
quavered the cook. "If anybody knows a better prayer I wish he"d say it."
"Plumb over--upside down! Worse off than flies in a puddle of Porty Reek mola.s.ses," mourned Mr. Speed.
The master joined the mate in lamentation. "I have brought my baby to this! I have brought my Polly here! G.o.d forgive me. Can"t you speak to me, Polly?"
Mayo found the girl very quiet in the hook of his arm, and he put his free hand against her cheek. She did not move under his touch.
"She has fainted, sir."
"No, she"s dead! She"s dead!" Candage began to weep and started to splash his way across the cabin, directed by Mayo"s voice.
"She is all right--she is breathing," the young man a.s.sured the father.
"Here! This way, captain! Take her. Hold her up. I want to see whether anything can be done for us."
"Nothing can be done!" whimpered Candage. "We"re goners."
"We"re goners," averred Oak.u.m Otie.
"We"re goners," echoed Dolph.
Mayo gave the girl into the groping arms of her father and stood for a few moments reflecting on their desperate plight. He was not hopeful. In his heart he agreed with the convictions which his mates were expressing in childish falsetto. But being a young sailor who found his head above water, he resolved to keep on battling in that emergency; the adage of the coastwise mariner is: "Don"t die till Davy Jones sets his final pinch on your weasen!"