Wyllard made a sign of comprehension, and they slid away on the back of a long sea. Others rolled up behind them, cutting off the schooner"s hull so that only her grey canvas showed above dim slopes of water, but there was no curl on any and the beach rose fast. It looked very forbidding with the spray-haze drifting over it, and the long wash of the Pacific weltering among its hammered stones, and when they drew a little nearer Wyllard stood up with the big sculling oar in his hand.
There was no point to offer shelter, and in only one place could he see a strip of surf-lapped sand.
"It"s a little softer than the boulders, anyway; we"ll try it there,"
he said.
The oars dipped again, and in another minute or two the sea that came up behind them hove them high and broke into a little spout of foam.
The next had a hissing crest, part of which splashed on board, and they went sh.o.r.ewards like a toboggan down an icy slide on the shoulders of the third. To keep her straight while it seethed about them was all that they could do, but it was also essentially necessary, and for a moment their hearts were in their mouths when it left them to sink with a dizzy swing into the hollow. Then they pulled desperately as another white-topped ridge came on astern, and went up with it amidst a chaotic frothing and splashing and a haze of spray. After that there was a shock and a crash, and they sprang out knee-deep and held fast to the boat while the foam boiled into her, floundering and stumbling over sliding sand. Still, before the next sea came in they had run her up beyond its reach, and there did not seem to be much the matter with her when they hove her over. Wyllard, however, looked back at the tumbling surf.
"Dampier was right about that topsail; it won"t be quite as easy getting off," he said. "You"ll stand by, Charly, and watch the schooner. If the surf gets steeper you can make some sign. I"ll leave one of the Siwash on the rise yonder."
Then he walked up the beach, and stopped awhile on the crest of the low rise a mile or two behind it, gazing out at what seemed to be an empty desolation. There were willows in the hollow beneath him, and upon the slope a few little stunted trees, which he fancied resembled the juniper he had seen among the ranges of British Columbia, but he could see no sign of any kind of life. What was more portentous, the mossy sod he stood upon was frozen, and there were smears of snow among the straggling firs upon a rather higher ridge. Inland, the little breeze seemed to have fallen dead away, and there was an oppressive silence which the rumble of the surf accentuated.
He left an Indian on the rise, and going on with the other scrambled through a half-frozen swamp in the hollow; but when they came back hours afterwards as the narrow horizon was drawing further in they had found nothing to show that any man had ever entered that grim, silent land. The surf seemed a little smoother, and they reeled out through it with no more than a few inches of very cold water splashing about their boots, and pulled across a long stretch of darkening sea towards the rolling schooner.
Wyllard was a little weary, and more depressed, but it was not until he sat in the stern cabin with its cheerful twinkling stove and swinging lamp that he understood how he had shrunk from that forbidding wilderness. His consultation with Dampier, who came in by and bye, was very brief.
"We"ll head north for a couple of days, and try again," he said.
He crawled into his berth early, and it was some time after midnight when he was awakened by being rudely flung out of it. That fact, and the slant of deck and sounds above, suggested that the schooner had been hove down by a sudden gale. He had, however, grown more or less accustomed to occurrences of this kind and to sleeping fully dressed, and in another moment or two he was out of the deck-house. Then a wind that seemed sharp as steel drove stinging flakes of snow into his face.
It was very dark, but he fancied that the schooner"s rail was in the sea, which was washing over her to weather, and that some of the others were struggling to get the mainsail off her. Then a man whom he supposed to be Charly ran into him.
"Better come for"ard. Got to haul outer jib down before it blows away," he said.
Wyllard staggered after him up to his knees in water, and made out by the mad banging that some of them had already cast the peak of the boom-foresail loose. Then 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 about and beneath them. Over it rose the black wedge of the jibs.
He did not want to get out along the bowsprit to stop one of them down.
Indeed his whole physical nature shrank from it, but there are many things flesh and blood shrink from which must be faced at sea. Then he made out that a Siwash was fumbling at the down-haul made fast near his side, and when his companion"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.
She went into it to the windla.s.s. He 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 he was swung, gasping and streaming with water, 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 bodily. As it dropped the wind took hold of the folds of it and buffeted them cruelly. This was a thing he had once been accustomed to, but 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 he clawed at it furiously with bleeding hands while twice the bowsprit raked a sea and dipped him waist-deep in. At length 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.
"North-east," said the skipper.
They could scarcely hear each other, though the schooner was lurching over it more easily now with shortened canvas, and Wyllard only made Dampier understand that he wished to speak to him 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.
"It"s 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," said the other. "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 realised that to do so would put the schooner ash.o.r.e.
"Well?" he said 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," said Wyllard, "somebody would lose his bonus."
Dampier swung round on him with a flash in his eyes.
"The bonus!" he said. "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 tack, 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."
Then 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.
Daylight broke on a frothing sea, across which there scudded wisps of smoke-like drift and thin showers of snow, before they hove her to.
Then, with two little wet rags of canvas set she lay almost head on to the big combers, and met their onslaught with a hove-up weather bow.
Having little way upon her, she lurched over instead of ramming them, 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 round the narrow circle a leaden sky met the sea. To weather the combers were bitten into it in cleancut serrations, but to leeward the dim horizon was blurred by flying spray, save when the snow whirled down in thicker wisps and blotted it out altogether. It was bitterly cold, and the spray stung the skin like half-spent pellets from a gun.
There was, however, only one man exposed to it in turn, 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.
In the meanwhile, 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 say at sea, and the heat of the stove had further opened up the seams of it. Moisture dripped from the beams overhead, moisture trickled up and down the slanting deck, there were great globules of it on the bulk-heading, and everything, including the men"s clothes and blankets, was wet. They lay in their bunks from necessity, because it was a somewhat laborious matter to sit, and said very little since it was difficult to hear anything amidst the cataclysm of elemental sound. Indeed, it became at length almost a relief to turn out into inky darkness or misty daylight dimmed by flying spray to take a trick at the jarring wheel.
For three days this continued, and then, when the gale broke and a little pale sunshine streamed down on the tumbling sea, changing the grey combers to flashing white and green, they gave her a double-reefed mainsail, part of the boom-foresail, and a jib or two, and thrashed her slowly back to the northwards on the starboard tack. Still, more than one of them glanced over the taffrail longingly as she gathered way.
She was fast, and with a little driving and that breeze over her quarter she would bear them south towards 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 the over-taxed body must bear, the leaden weariness of worn-out limbs, and the sub-conscious 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. That is, at least, on board the sailing ships where man must still, with almost brutal valour, pit all the feeble powers of flesh and blood against the forces of the elements.
They 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.
Their leader, 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 ago, asked for volunteers. He realised 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 grey day was almost over, and the long heave ran sluggishly after them faintly wrinkled here and there, when creeping through a belt of haze they came into sight of several blurrs of greyish white that swung with the dim, green swell.
The _Selache_ was slowly lurching over it with everything aloft to the topsails then. Dampier glanced at the ice disgustedly.
"Earlier than I expected," he said. "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 laughed grimly. "Well," he said, "that"s quite simple.