Part 36

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 knob, 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 assured 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 molasses,” mourned Mr. Speed.

The master joined the mate in lamentation. “I have brought my baby to this! I have brought my Polly here! God 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 assured 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 Oakum 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!”

First of all, he gave full consideration to what had happened. The Polly had been whipped over so quickly that she had been transformed into a sort of diving-bell.{*} That is to say, a considerable amount of air had been captured and was now retained in her. It was compressed by the water which was forced up from below through the windows and the shattered skylight. The pressure on Mayo's temples afforded him information on this point. The Polly was floating, and he felt comforting confidence that she would continue to float for some time. But this prospect did not insure safety or promise life to the unfortunates who had been trapped in her bowels. The air must either escape gradually or become vitiated as they breathed it.

* The strange adventure of the Polly is not an improbability of fiction. A Bath, Maine, schooner, lumber- laden, was tripped in exactly this fashion off Hatteras. Captain Boyd Mayo's exploit has been paralleled in real life in all details. My good friend Captain Elliott C. Gardner, former skipper of the world's only seven-master, the Thomas W. Lawson, furnished those details to me, and after writing this part of the tale I submitted the narrative to him for confirmation. It has received his indorsement.--H. D.