Part 40

IX ~ A MAN'S JOB

O Nancy Dawson, hi--o! Cheer'ly man! She's got a notion, hi--o! Cheer'ly manl For our old bo'sun, hi--o! Cheer'ly man! O hauley hi--o! Cheer'ly man! --Hauling Song.

Boyd Mayo soon found that his ancestors had put no scrub timber into the Polly. The old oak rib was tough as well as bulky. The task of sawing with merely the tip of the blade in play required both muscle and patience, and the position he was obliged to assume added to his difficulties. He rested after he had sawed the rib in four places, and decided to give Oakum Otie something to do; the mate had been begging for an opportunity to grab in. He was ordered to knock away as much as he could of the sawed section with hammer and chisel. Mayo figured that when this section of rib had been removed it would leave room for a hole through the bottom planks at least two feet square--and there were no swelling girths in their party.

The mate had strength, and he was eager to display that helpful spirit of which he had boasted. He went at the beam with all his might.

Mayo's attention had been centered on his task; now, with a moment's leisure in which to note other matters, he was conscious of something which provoked his apprehension; the air under the hull of the schooner was becoming vitiated. His temples throbbed and his ears rang.

“Ain't it getting pretty stuffy in here?” asked the master, putting words to Mayo's thoughts.

“I have been feeling like a bug under a thimble for some little time,” stated Otie, whacking his chisel sturdily.

“Her bottom can't be awash with all this lumber in her. If we can only get a little speck of a hole through the outside planking right now, we'd better do it,” suggested Candage.

“That's just what I have been doing,” declared Mr. Speed. “I'm right after the job, gents, when I get started on a thing. Helpful and enterprising, that's my motto!”

The next moment, before Mayo, his thoughts busy with his new danger of suffocation, could voice warning or had grasped the full import of the dialogue, the chisel's edge plugged through the planking. Instantly there was a hiss like escaping steam. Mayo yelled an oath and set his hands against the mate, pushing him violently away. The industrious Mr. Speed had been devoting his attention to the planking instead of to the sawed beam.

Wan light filtered through the crevice made by the chisel and Mayo planted his palm against the crack. The pressure held his hand as if it were clamped against the planks, and the hissing ceased.

The schooner, as she lay, upside down in the sea, was practically a diving-bell; with that hole in her shell their safety was in jeopardy. The girl seemed to understand the situation before the duller minds of her father and his mates had begun to work. She frenziedly sought for Mayo's disengaged hand and thrust some kind of fabric into it.

“It's from my petticoat,” she gasped. “Can you calk with it?”

“Hand me the chisel,” he entreated.

As soon as she had given the tool to him he worked his hand free from the crack and instantly drove the fabric into the crevice, crowding it fold by fold with the edge of the chisel.

“Hope I didn't do anything wrong, trying to be helpful,” apologized Mr. Speed.

“I'll do the rest of this job without any such help,” growled the captain.

“But what are you stopping the air for when it's rushing in to liven us up?” asked Dolph, plaintively.

“It was rushing out, fool! Rushing out so fast that this lumber would have flattened us against the bottom of this hull in a little while.”

“I would have figgered it just t'other way,” stated Mr. Speed, humbly. “Outside air, being fresh, ought nat'rally to rush in to fill the holes we have breathed out of this air.”

Mayo was in no mood to lecture on natural phenomena. He investigated the cut which had been made by the incautious mate and estimated, by what his fingers told him, that the schooner's bottom planks were three inches thick. He settled back on his haunches and gave a little thought to the matter, and understood that he had a ticklish job ahead of him. Those planks must be gouged around the complete square of the proposed opening, so that the section might be driven out in one piece by a blow from beneath. That section must give way wholly and instantly. They were doomed if they made a half-job of it. In that pitchy blackness he had only his fingers to guide him. That one little streak of light from the open world without was tantalizing promise. On the other side of those planks was God's limitless air. The poor creatures penned under that hull were gasping and choking for want of that air. Mayo set bravely to work, hammering at the chisel-head above him.

All were silent. They felt the initial languor of suffocation and knew the peril which was threatening them.

“If there is anything I can do--” ventured Otie.

“There isn't!”

Captain Mayo felt the lack of oxygen most cruelly, because he was working with all his might. Perspiration was streaming into his eyes, he was panting like a running dog, his blows were losing force.

He found that Otie had partly cleared out the rib before that too-willing helper had taken it into his head to knock a hole through the planking. The rib must come away entirely! The tough oak resisted; the chisel slipped; it was maddeningly slow work. But he finished the task at last and began to gouge a channel in the planking close to the other ribs. Torpor was wrapping its tentacles about him. He heard his companions gasping for breath. Then, all at once, he felt a little pat on his shoulder. He knew that tap for what it was, though she did not speak to him; it was the girl's reassuring touch. It comforted him to be told in that manner that she was keeping up her courage in the horrible situation. He beveled the planks as deeply as he dared, and made his cut around three sides of his square. He was forced to stop for a moment and lay prostrate, his face on the lumber.

“Take that saw, one of you, and chunk off a few short lengths of plank,” he whispered, hoarsely. The rasp of the hand-saw informed him that he had been obeyed.

He held his eyes wide open with effort as he lay there in the darkness. Then he struggled up and went at his task once more. Queerly colored flames were shooting before his straining eyes. He toiled in partial delirium, and it seemed to him that he was looking again at the phantasmagoria of the Coston lights on the fog when the yachtsmen were serenading the girl of the Polly. He found himself muttering, keeping time to his chisel-blows: