"Here she comes!"
All rushed to holding-ground, and held, while the whale broke more timbers and the _Mary Turner_ rolled sluggishly down and back again.
"Lower away! On the run! Lively!"
Captain Doane"s orders were swiftly obeyed. The starboard boat, fended off by sailors, rose and fell in the water alongside while the remainder of the dunnage and provisions showered into her.
"Might as well lend a hand, sir, seein" you"re bent on leaving in such a hurry," said Daughtry, taking the chronometer from Captain Doane"s hand and standing ready to pa.s.s it down to him as soon as he was in the boat.
"Come on, Greenleaf," Grimshaw called up to the Ancient Mariner.
"No, thanking you very kindly, sir," came the reply. "I think there"ll be more room in the other boat."
"We want the cook!" Nishikanta cried out from the stern sheets. "Come on, you yellow monkey! Jump in!"
Little old shrivelled Ah Moy debated. He visibly thought, although none knew the intrinsicness of his thinking as he stared at the gun of the fat p.a.w.nbroker and at the leprosy of Kwaque and Daughtry, and weighed the one against the other and tossed the light and heavy loads of the two boats into the balance.
"Me go other boat," said Ah Moy, starting to drag his bag away across the deck.
"Cast off," Captain Doane commanded.
Sc.r.a.ps, the big Newfoundland puppy, who had played and pranced about through all the excitement, seeing so many of the _Mary Turner"s_ humans in the boat alongside, sprang over the rail, low and close to the water, and landed sprawling on the ma.s.s of sea-bags and goods cases.
The boot rocked, and Nishikanta, his automatic in his hand, cried out:
"Back with him! Throw him on board!"
The sailors obeyed, and the astounded Sc.r.a.ps, after a brief flight through the air, found himself arriving on his back on the _Mary Turner"s_ deck. At any rate, he took it for no more than a rough joke, and rolled about ecstatically, squirming vermicularly, in antic.i.p.ation of what new delights of play were to be visited upon him. He reached out, with an enticing growl of good fellowship, for Michael, who was now free on deck, and received in return a forbidding and crusty snarl.
"Guess we"ll have to add him to our collection, eh, sir?" Daughtry observed, sparing a moment to pat rea.s.surance on the big puppy"s head and being rewarded with a caressing lick on his hand from the puppy"s blissful tongue.
No first-cla.s.s ship"s steward can exist without possessing a more than average measure of executive ability. Dag Daughtry was a first-cla.s.s ship"s steward. Placing the Ancient Mariner in a nook of safety, and setting Big John to unlashing the remaining boat and hooking on the falls, he sent Kwaque into the hold to fill kegs of water from the scant remnant of supply, and Ah Moy to clear out the food in the galley.
The starboard boat, cluttered with men, provisions, and property and being rapidly rowed away from the danger centre, which was the _Mary Turner_, was scarcely a hundred yards away, when the whale, missing the schooner clean, turned at full speed and close range, churning the water, and all but collided with the boat. So near did she come that the rowers on the side next to her pulled in their oars. The surge she raised, heeled the loaded boat gunwale under, so that a degree of water was shipped ere it righted. Nishikanta, automatic still in hand, standing up in the sternsheets by the comfortable seat he had selected for himself, was staggered by the lurch of the boat. In his instinctive, spasmodic effort to maintain balance, he relaxed his clutch on the pistol, which fell into the sea.
"_Ha-ah_!" Daughtry girded. "What price Nishikanta? I got his number, and he"s lost you fellows" goats. He"s your meat now. Easy meat? I should say! And when it comes to the eating, eat him first. Sure, he"s a skunk, and will taste like one, but many"s the honest man that"s eaten skunk and pulled through a tight place. But you"d better soak "im all night in salt water, first."
Grimshaw, whose seat in the sternsheets was none of the best, grasped the situation simultaneously with Daughtry, and, with a quick upstanding, and hooking out-reach of hand, caught the fat p.a.w.nbroker around the back of the neck, and with anything but gentle suasion jerked him half into the air and flung him face downward on the bottom boards.
"Ha-ah!" said Daughtry across the hundred yards of ocean.
Next, and without hurry, Grimshaw took the more comfortable seat for himself.
"Want to come along?" he called to Daughtry.
"No, thank you, sir," was the latter"s reply. "There"s too many of us, an" we"ll make out better in the other boat."
With some bailing, and with others bending to the oars, the boat rowed frantically away, while Daughtry took Ah Moy with him down into the lazarette beneath the cabin floor and broke out and pa.s.sed up more provisions.
It was when he was thus below that the cow grazed the schooner just for"ard of amidships on the port side, lashed out with her mighty tail as she sounded, and ripped clean away the chain plates and rail of the mizzen-shrouds. In the next roll of the huge, gla.s.sy sea, the mizzen- mast fell overside.
"My word, some whale," Daughtry said to Ah Moy, as they emerged from the cabin companionway and gazed at this latest wreckage.
Ah Moy found need to get more food from the galley, when Daughtry, Kwaque, and Big John swung their weight on the falls, one at a time, and hoisted the port boat, one end at a time, over the rail and swung her out.
"We"ll wait till the next smash, then lower away, throw everything in, an" get outa this," the steward told the Ancient Mariner. "Lots of time.
The schooner"ll sink no faster when she"s awash than she"s sinkin" now."
Even as he spoke, the scuppers were nearly level with the ocean, and her rolling in the big sea was sluggish.
"Hey!" he called with sudden forethought across the widening stretch of sea to Captain Doane. "What"s the course to the Marquesas? Right now?
And how far away, sir?"
"Nor"-nor"-east-quarter-east!" came the faint reply. "Will fetch Nuka- Hiva! About two hundred miles! Haul on the south-east trade with a good full and you"ll make it!"
"Thank you, sir," was the steward"s acknowledgment, ere he ran aft, disrupted the binnacle, and carried the steering compa.s.s back to the boat.
Almost, from the whale"s delay in renewing her charging, did they think she had given over. And while they waited and watched her rolling on the sea an eighth of a mile away, the _Mary Turner_ steadily sank.
"We might almost chance it," Daughtry was debating aloud to Big John, when a new voice entered the discussion.
"c.o.c.ky!--c.o.c.ky!" came plaintive tones from below out of the steerage companion.
"Devil be d.a.m.ned!" was the next, uttered in irritation and anger. "Devil be d.a.m.ned! Devil be d.a.m.ned!"
"Of course not," was Daughtry"s judgment, as he dashed across the deck, crawled through the confusion of the main-topmast and its many stays that blocked the way, and found the tiny, white morsel of life perched on a bunk-edge, ruffling its feathers, erecting and flattening its rosy crest, and cursing in honest human speech the waywardness of the world and of ships and humans upon the sea.
The c.o.c.katoo stepped upon Daughtry"s inviting index finger, swiftly ascended his shirt sleeve, and, on his shoulder, claws sunk into the flimsy shirt fabric till they hurt the flesh beneath, leaned head to ear and uttered in grat.i.tude and relief, and in self-identification: "c.o.c.ky.
c.o.c.ky."
"You son of a gun," Daughtry crooned.
"Glory be!" Cooky replied, in tones so like Daughtry"s as to startle him.
"You son of a gun," Daughtry repeated, cuddling his cheek and ear against the c.o.c.katoo"s feathered and crested head. "And some folks thinks it"s only folks that count in this world."
Still the whale delayed, and, with the ocean washing their toes on the level deck, Daughtry ordered the boat lowered away. Ah Moy was eager in his haste to leap into the bow. Nor was Daughtry"s judgment correct that the little Chinaman"s haste was due to fear of the sinking ship. What Ah Moy sought was the place in the boat remotest from Kwaque and the steward.
Shoving clear, they roughly stored the supplies and dunnage out of the way of the thwarts and took their places, Ah Moy pulling bow-oar, next in order Big John and Kwaque, with Daughtry (c.o.c.ky still perched on his shoulder) at stroke. On top of the dunnage, in the sternsheets, Michael gazed wistfully at the _Mary Turner_ and continued to snarl crustily at Sc.r.a.ps who idiotically wanted to start a romp. The Ancient Mariner stood up at the steering sweep and gave the order, when all was ready, for the first dip of the oars.
A growl and a bristle from Michael warned them that the whale was not only coming but was close upon them. But it was not charging. Instead, it circled slowly about the schooner as if examining its antagonist.
"I"ll bet it"s head"s sore from all that banging, an" it"s beginnin" to feel it," Daughtry grinned, chiefly for the purpose of keeping his comrades unafraid.
Barely had they rowed a dozen strokes, when an exclamation from Big John led them to follow his gaze to the schooners forecastle-head, where the forecastle cat flashed across in pursuit of a big rat. Other rats they saw, evidently driven out of their lairs by the rising water.
"We just can"t leave that cat behind," Daughtry soliloquized in suggestive tones.