Part 35

The wind had not attained the velocity of a gale, but it did have an ugly growl which suggested further violence. Mayo braced himself, ready to bring the schooner about in order to give the crew an opportunity to shorten sail.

Captain Candage, deposed as autocrat for the moment, seemed to be uncertain as to his duties.

Mayo, understanding mariner nature, felt some contrition and was prompted by saner second thought.

“You'd better take the wheel, Captain Candage. You know her tricks better than I do in a seaway. I'll help the boys take in sail.”

The master obeyed with alacrity. He seemed to be cowed. Anger no longer blinded him to their predicament.

“Just say what you want done, and I'll try to do it,” he told Mayo, in a voice which had become suddenly mild and rather beseeching. Then he called to his daughter, who had come to the foot of the companion steps, “Better blow out that cabin light, Polly girl! She's li'ble to dance bad, and we don't want to run the chance of fire.”

Mayo got a glimpse at her face as he hurried upon the house on his way to the main halyards. Her face was pale, but there was the firm spirit of her Yankee ancestry of the sea in her poise and in her very silence in that crisis. She obeyed without complaint or question and the cabin was dark; even the glimmer of the light had held something of cheer. Now the gloom was somber and depressing.

The schooner came round with a sort of scared hurry when the master threw the wheel hard over and trod on the spokes with all his weight. As soon as the bellying mainsail began to flap, the three men let it go on the run. They kept up the jumbo sail, as the main jib is called; they reefed the foresail down to its smallest compass.

Mayo, young, nimble, and eager, singly knotted more reef points than both his helpers together, and his crisp commands were obeyed unquestioningly.

“He sartinly is chain lightning in pants,” confided Dolph to Otie.

“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 passing gusts which assailed 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' superstition 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.