In the Misty Seas: A Story of the Sealers of Behring Strait
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Title: In the Misty Seas: A Story of the Sealers of Behring Strait
Creator: Harold Bindloss
Release date: January 18, 2015 [eBook #47992]
Most recently updated: July 27, 2016
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47992
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE MISTY SEAS: A STORY OF THE SEALERS OF BEHRING STRAIT ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover art]
*[Frontispiece: "'TELL YOUR SKIPPER THAT IF EVER I FIND HIS SCHOONER
INSIDE OUR LIMITS AGAIN I'LL HAVE MUCH PLEASURE
IN SINKING HER" (missing from book)]*
*In the Misty Seas*
A Story of the
Sealers of Behring Strait
By
Harold Bindloss
_Author of "True Grit," etc._
With Six Illustrations
London
S. W. Partridge and Co.
8 and 9 Paternoster Row, E.C.
*CONTENTS*
CHAP.
I. JIMMY'S DUCK
II. OUT OF DOCK
III. DOWN CHANNEL
IV. A LESSON IN SEAMANSHIP
V. UNDER TOPSAILS
VI. A FAIR WIND
VII. ADRIFT
VIII. THE 'CHAMPLAIN,' SEALER
IX. A TRIAL OF SPEED
X. HOVE TO
XI. AMONG THE HOLLISCHACKIE
XII. PICKING UP THE BOATS
XIII. ON THE BEACH
XIV. GOOD WORK
XV. IN PERIL
XVI. STICKINE MAKES A DEAL
XVII. THE PLEDGE REDEEMED
XVIII. TREACHERY
XIX. THE SEALERS' RECKONING
XX. THE NEXT MEETING
XXI. IN VANCOUVER
XXII. THE RESULT OF THE CHOICE
*LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS*
"'TELL YOUR SKIPPER THAT IF EVER I FIND HIS SCHOONER INSIDE OUR LIMITS
AGAIN I'LL HAVE MUCH PLEASURE IN SINKING HER" (missing from book) . . .
_Frontispiece_
"'CHRISS, ARE YOU HURT?'"
"'ARE YOU TWO LADS GOING OFF TO THE BARQUE OUT THERE?'"
"GLANCING OVER HIS SHOULDER, SAW THE INDIAN STILL CROUCHING MOTIONLESS,
RIFLE IN HAND"
"AS HE HOPPED ABOUT THE DECK, APPLEBY LAUGHED UPROARIOUSLY"
"'I'VE COME FOR THE TWO LADS YOU PICKED UP.'"
*IN THE MISTY SEAS*
*CHAPTER I*
*JIMMY'S DUCK*
"The sea!" said Bluey, the Nova Scotian, sitting up on his pillow. "Oh,
yes. It's kind of pretty, but the only use I've got for it is for
bathing in."
There was laughter and a growl of disapproval from two beds in a corner
of the dormitory, for nobody could go to sleep at nine o'clock,
especially on the last night of the term, though retiring at that hour
was compulsory at Sandycombe School. Pearson, the assistant master, had
not, however, come round as yet to turn the lights out, and the gas-jet
blinked fitfully in the big wire cage which apparently protected it from
unlawful experiments. It did not, however, do so in reality, because
Niven had discovered that the cage could be unscrewed, and it was not
difficult to curtail the hour of preparation in the morning and evening
by blowing strenuously down the pipe in turn. There were, of course,
risks attached to this, but Niven had pointed out that anybody caught at
the operation would suffer in a good cause, and it provided work for the
Sandycombe plumber, who was voted a good fellow because he would smuggle
in forbidden dainties for a consideration.
"The sea," said Appleby, "is everything that's fine. What do you know
about it, Bluey?"
"Well," said the Nova Scotian in his slowest drawl, "I do know quite a
little. You see, ours is a kind of hard country, and most of our folks
go in sea now and then when they can't do better. Sometimes it's
fishing way out on the Grand Banks where you got lost in a fog in the
dory boats and starve before the schooner finds you, and if you don't
it's quite likely a liner steaming twenty knots runs bang over you. Or
it's carrying dried cod south in little schooners in winter time, with
your long boots stuffed with straw to keep your feet from freezing,
while you run for it under a trysail that's stiff with ice, with a
full-size blizzard screaming behind you. No, sir. Going to sea isn't
any kind of picnic, and that's why I'm sorry for Niven. The fellows who
wrote those books 'bout cutting out pirates and catching slavers are
dead, and it's 'bout time they were."
"Bluey's not going to stop to-night. Throw a pillow at him, somebody,"
said Niven, and there was a thud as the Nova Scotian's slipper, which
was quicker than the pillow, alighted within an inch of the speaker's
head.
Niven, however, took it good-naturedly, and he would have resented a
better shot less than the remarks which had preceded it. He was going
to sea, and had been describing his apprentice's uniform, and the life
he fancied he was to lead on board a sailing ship, to an appreciative
audience. His contentment had only one alloy, and that was the fact
that Appleby, who had read Marryat and others with him under a gorse
bush on sunny afternoons when he was presumed to be playing cricket, was
not coming with him too. Nobody, however, was apparently willing to pay
Appleby's premium, and Niven pinned his last hope on the possibility of
his comrade being able to ship on the same vessel as ordinary seaman.
Appleby, whom Niven privately considered somewhat slow and
over-cautious, did not appear very enthusiastic about the scheme.
"To your kennels!" said somebody, and there was a footfall on the
stairway, while two cots rattled as a couple of scantily-attired forms
alighted upon them with a flying leap. They had been lying prone upon
the floor giving a realistic representation of Niven swimming ashore
with the captain in his teeth, though the lad who played the part of
skipper protested vigorously that there was no necessity for his being
grievously bitten.
"That was fine," said somebody. "When Pearson's gone we'll have it
again. You could pour some water on to him first to make it more real."
"Then," said the skipper, "you'll get somebody else in the place of me.
It was a good deal nicer the last time I was nibbled by a ferret, and
I'm not going home with hydrophobia to please any of you."
After this there was silence whilst the footsteps grew nearer, and
presently the assistant master came into the room.
"You are all here?" he said as he swept his glance from bed to bed.
Then he gave a little sigh of relief, for he had a good deal to do that
night, and they were all there, and apparently very sleepy, while it was
not his fault that he did not see that two of them wore their outdoor
clothes under their night gear. Appleby and Niven had business on hand,
and they had discovered that with the aid of contributions levied from
their comrades it was possible to lay out a suit of clothing that
sufficed to pass a hasty inspection on their chairs. Pearson, however,
glanced round again, for he had been taught that there was need for
greater watchfulness when his charges were unusually quiet, and then
turned out the gas.
"Good-night, boys. If there is any breach of rules some of you will not
go home to-morrow," he said.
Two minutes later everybody was wide awake again, and a voice was raised
in a corner.
"Let's have a court-martial and try Bluey for conduct unbecoming an
officer and a gentleman," it said. "You'll be president, Appleby, and
we'll make Niven executioner."
"Sorry," said Niven, "but we can't. You see, Appleby and I have got
another assize on to-night. We're going to put an _habeas corpus_ on
Tileworks Jimmy's duck."
"More fools you!" said Bluey. "I'm sorry, too, because I've a few
fixings handy that would double the court-martial up. Anyway, you'll
only catch red-hot trouble instead of Jimmy's duck."
"What's that about a duck?" asked a lad who had come up in the middle of
the term, and a comrade proceeded to enlighten him.
"It is by this time ancient history, and it may have been a drake," he
said. "Anyway, this is Appleby's story. He stays here in the holidays,
you know, and he made a catapult thing during the last ones."
"It wasn't," said Appleby. "It was a crossbow, and Pearson thought so
much of it that he took it from me."
"Well," said the other, "Appleby went out shooting, and shot a wild
duck, but it was a tame one, and Tileworks Jimmy's. Now if he'd been
wiser he'd have buried it, but he took it to Jimmy's house. Jimmy
wasn't in, and Appleby forgot, but a few days later Jimmy came round to
see the Head, and wanted ten shillings for his duck. Took an affidavit
that it would have won prizes at a dog show anywhere. The Head, who
should have kicked him out, gave him five shillings, and stopped it out
of Appleby's pocket-money, and Appleby went back to Jimmy's to ask for
his duck. Jimmy told him how nice it was, and that he'd eaten the thing
to save it going bad. That, I think, is Q.E.D. Appleby."
Appleby laughed softly. "You're not very far out, but it wasn't the
duck but the principle of the thing that worried me," he said. "The one
I shot was a common one worth one-and-six, and I didn't even get it,
though when Jimmy took the money he sold it me. Now I don't like to be
cheated by anybody."
There was a little laughter, for Appleby was known to be tenacious of
his rights.
"It was better than a circus when he made the Aunt Sally man fork out
the cocoa-nuts he won," said somebody.
"Well," said Appleby slowly, "it was right, and sixpence has to go a
long way with me. I don't get so many of them as the rest of you."
He slipped out of bed as he spoke, and there was another rustle when
Niven followed him, while a lad in the cot nearest them sat up.
"You haven't told us how you're going to get the duck," he said.
"That," said Niven, "is going to be almost too easy. I throw big stones
on Jimmy's roof, and when he comes out after me Appleby slips in and
gets the duck. With a little brains a fellow can do anything."
Next moment they were out in the dark corridor, and Niven held his
breath as they slipped past the half-open door of a lighted room where
the Head of the school was busy making out the bills. The treatment at
Sandycombe was at least as firm as kind, and the Head was known to have
an unpleasantly heavy hand. Nobody heard them, however, and in another
minute or two they were crawling about the dark passage where Charley,
the boy of all work, had laid out a long row of boots. Niven, it was
characteristic, took the first pair that seemed to fit him, while
Appleby went up and down the row on his hands and knees, until his
comrade fancied he would never be ready. Then Niven shoved up a window.
"Get through while I hold it. There isn't any sash-weight," he said.
"Then who's going to hold it for you?" said Appleby. "There'll be no
duck catching if it comes down with a bang."
Niven growled disgustedly. "Your turn! I never thought of that," he
said.
"Then," said Appleby, "it's a good thing I did. Put this piece of stick
under it."
It was done, and they dropped into a flower bed, slipped through the
garden behind the hollies, across a quaggy field, and came out into the
road just beyond the village. It was drizzling, and a bitter wind drove
a thin white mist past them. Niven stood still a moment ankle-deep in
mud, and glanced back towards the lights of the village blinking through
the haze.
"It doesn't look quite so nice now, but we had better go on," he said.
Appleby said nothing, but laughed a little as he plodded on into the
rain and mist, and, though the plan was Niven's, this was typical of
him. Appleby was not very brilliant at either work or play, but he
usually did what he took in hand with a slow thoroughness that
occasionally carried him further than his comrade's cleverness. He was
also slow to begin a friendship or make a quarrel, but those who drove
him into the latter usually regretted it, and his friends were good.
Nobody but Niven knew anything about his relations, while it was but
once in the term, somebody sent him a few shillings for pocket money.
Niven on the contrary could do almost anything he wanted well, and came
back each term with several hampers and a big handful of silver in his
pocket.
"It's beastly cold, and one of these boots is coming off. I'm not sure
it's my own," he said. "It would be a good joke for the other fellow if
I lost it."
"It wouldn't be for me," said Appleby dryly. "If I lost mine I would
have to go home with you in my stockings, but we'll have to get on
faster than we're doing."
They could scarcely see the hedgerows, and the mud got deeper. Now and
then a half-seen tree shook big drops down on them as they went by, and
there way a doleful crying of wild fowl from a marsh not far away. The
drizzle also beat into their eyes, and Niven, who felt distinctly sorry
he had ever heard about the duck, presently stopped altogether with his
feet in a pool.
"We could still go back, Tom," he said.
"No," said Appleby dryly. "I don't think we could, though because I
could manage it myself there's nothing to stop you if you wanted to."
There was not much mirth in Niven's laugh. "I'm not very anxious, if
you put it like that," he said.
They went on again, getting rapidly wetter, until Niven fell down as
they clambered over a dripping stile. "We're a pair of splay-footed
asses, Tom," he said.
Appleby nodded. "Still, we'd be bigger ones if we did nothing after all
this. I wouldn't sit there in the mud," he said.
Niven scrambled to his feet, and presently they crawled through a hedge
into a rutted lane with the lighted window of a cottage close in front
of them, and the radiance shone upon them as they stopped to glance up
and down. Appleby stood square and resolute with decision in his face,
and he was short and thick, with long arms and broad shoulders. Niven
shivered a little, and leaned forwards turning his head this way and
that with quick, nervous movements. He was lithe and light, with a
graceful suppleness that was not seen in his companion.
"Tom," he said softly, "there aren't any stones. Still, I could heave a
lump of stiff mud through the window, and that would fetch him."
Appleby shook his head. "There are tiles yonder, and they would do as
well," he said. "You see, we are entitled to the duck, but Jimmy's
window is another thing. Give me a minute, and then begin."
He slipped away into the gloom of a hedge, and it was evidently high
time, for a dog commenced growling. Niven felt very lonely as he stood
still in the rain, but the depression only lasted a moment or two, and
in another minute he had flung a big tile upon the roof. When the
second went banging and rattling down the slates he raised a
high-pitched howl.
"Jimmy, come out," he said. "Come out, you shuttle-toed clay stamper,
and be a man."
He was not kept waiting long. The door swung open and a man stood out
black against the light in the opening. He was peering into the
darkness, and apparently grasped a good-sized stick, but when another
tile crashed against the low roof above his head he saw the object
deriding him in the mud.
"Ellen, loose the dog," he said as he sprang forward.
Niven promptly darted up the lane, but there were two things he had not
counted on, and one of them was the dog, for Jimmy had not kept one when
they last passed his cottage. The other was even more embarrassing, for
while Niven could run tolerably well on turf in cricket shoes the deep
sticky mud was different, and one of the boots which were somebody
else's would slip up and down his foot. Still because Jimmy was not far
behind him, he did all he could, and was disgusted to find that a
tileworks labourer could run almost as well as he did. Indeed, for the
first Five minutes he had a horrible suspicion that Jimmy was running
better, but presently it became evident that the splashing thud of heavy
boots grew no louder, and he saw that he was at least maintaining his
lead. Still, he could not shake off the pursuer, and while he held on
with clenched hands and laboured breath an unfortunate thing happened.
One foot sank deep in a rut, Niven staggered, blundered through another
stride, and then rolled over in the grass under a tall hedge. That was
bad, but it was worse to find that he had now only a stocking upon one
foot. Jimmy was also unpleasantly close, and Niven, seeing he could not
escape by flight, rolled a little further beneath the hedge.
Then he lay very still while the man came floundering down the road, and
held his breath when he stopped as if to listen close beside him.
"The young varmint has made for the hedge gap," gasped the man. "If I
cut across to the stile I might ketch him."
He went on, and when his footsteps could no longer be heard Niven
crawled out and felt in the puddles for the boot. It was not to be
found, and rising with a groan he worked round towards the back of the
cottage. The dog was growling all the time, and he could hear a woman's
voice as well as a rattle of chain, but presently he saw a dark object
gliding along beneath a hedge. When he came up with it he noticed that
Appleby had something in his hand.
"I've got it," he said.
Niven looked at the object he held up. "It's very quiet," he said.
"Of course!" said Appleby. "You wouldn't make much noise without your
head. Killing anything is beastly, but there was a billhook handy.
We've no time for talking now. It's a good big dog."
They crossed a field, and Niven's shoeless foot did not greatly
embarrass him until they crawled through a hedge into recent ploughing,
while as they plodded over it the growling of the dog drew nearer.
"Come on!" gasped Appleby. "She has got him loose at last."
The beast was close at hand when another hedge rose up blackly against
the sky before them, and Niven swung off a little towards an oak that
grew out of it.
"It's a horrible brute, but it can't climb a tree. I'm going for the
oak," he said.
Appleby grasped his shoulder. "Jimmy could," he said. "Go on, and try
if you can pull one of those stakes in the gap up."
In another minute Niven was tearing out a thick stake, and felt a little
happier when he saw the end of it was sharpened, while Appleby had
clawed up a big clod of stiff clay from the ploughing.
"He's only a cur, any way, and I think there's a stone in it," he said.
They could now dimly see the dog, and it was evident that it saw them,
for it stopped, and then commenced to work round sideways in their
direction, growling as though a little disconcerted by their waiting.
"It's an ugly beast," said Niven, whose heart was in his mouth. "It
would get us if we ran."
"We're not going to run," said Appleby quietly, though his voice was a
trifle hoarse. "Howl at him, Chriss."
Niven commenced a discordant hissing, and the dog growled more angrily.
They could see it black against the ploughing, and it looked very big.
Appleby was standing perfectly still with something held up above his
head, and drew back a pace when the brute came creeping towards him.
"Here's something for you, Towser," he said, flinging his arm up.
Then a howl followed, and next moment Niven was tearing up the clay, and
hurling it in handfuls after something that seemed fading in the dimness
of the field. When he could see it no longer he stood up breathless.
"We've beaten him," he gasped. "It's about time we were going."
They went at once, and did not stop until they reached the road, where
Niven leaned against a gate, and glanced down ruefully at his foot.
"It wasn't so bad on the grass, but I don't know how I'm going to get
home now," he said.
"Put up your foot," said Appleby. "We'll tie our handkerchiefs round
it."
He was quick with his fingers, but when they turned homewards Niven was
not exactly happy. He was wet and very muddy, while, as he afterwards
observed, walking a long way on one foot is not especially easy. It was
also raining steadily, and a little trickle from his soaked cap ran down
his shoulders, while the bare hedgerows seemed to crawl back towards
them very slowly. The mud squelched and splashed underfoot, and there
was only the crying of the plover in the darkness.
"I never fancied it was such a beastly long way to the tileworks," he
said as he limped on painfully.
At last when the knotted handkerchief hurt his foot horribly a light or
two blinked faintly through the rain, and presently they plodded into
the silent village. Nobody seemed to see them, the window they had
slipped out of was still open, and crawling in they went up the stairway
and along the corridor on tiptoe with the water draining from them.
Niven had expected to find his comrades asleep, and was too wet and
dispirited to wish to waken them, but there was a murmur of sympathy
when he crept in.
"I wouldn't be you," said somebody. "The Head came in to ask how many
panes in the greenhouse Nettleton had broken, and he saw you were away."
"And he came back, and threatened to keep the whole of us here
to-morrow, if we didn't tell him where you were," said another lad. "It
was very nice of you to let us all into lumber."
"Did you tell him?" asked Appleby.
"Of course!" said a third speaker sardonically. "It's just what we
would do. I'll thank you for that to-morrow, and I'd get up now only
the Head would hear us, and he's breathing slaughter."
"Tearing around," said Bluey the Nova Scotian. "Cutlasses and pistols,
and the magazine open! You know the kind of thing you're fond of
reading."
Niven, who was tired out, groaned. As he told his comrades afterwards
he had enjoyed himself sufficiently already, and one wanted to brace up
before a visit from the Head.
"What are we going to do, Tom?" he said.
Appleby laughed softly. "I'm going straight to bed," he said. "The
Head's busy, and there mayn't be anything very dreadful if he sends
Pearson."
He was undressed in another two minutes, and as Niven crept into bed
somebody said, "Did you get the duck?"
"We did," said Niven solemnly. "And be hanged to it! That's enough for
you or anybody, and don't worry me. I want to be asleep when the Head
comes."
"You needn't be afraid he'll mind waking you," said another lad. "I'd
rolled up my jacket, so it looked just like Appleby's big head, and when
he saw it wasn't, he got speechless mad."
Ten minutes passed, and Niven was just feeling a little warm again when
there were footsteps in the corridor. They drew nearer, and with a
little gasp of dismay he swung himself out of and then under his bed. A
swish and a rustle told him that Appleby had followed his example, and a
voice from under the adjoining cot said, "He'll go away again if he
doesn't find us, and we may tire him out before the morning."
Next moment the door was opened, and while a light shone in somebody
said, "Asleep, of course, all of you! Have Niven and Appleby returned
yet?"
Niven, glancing out from under his cot, saw a robust elderly gentleman
holding a candle above him, while he swung what looked like a horse
girth suggestively in his other hand, but a snore answered the master's
question, and he laughed unpleasantly.
"We have had sufficient nonsense," he said. "You can either tell me at
once where your comrades went, or improve your memories by writing lines
the rest of the night."
Here and there a sleepy object sat up on a bed, but there was still no
answer, and the head of Sandycombe School tapped his foot impatiently on
the flooring.
"I'm not in a mood for trifling, boys," he said. "You have another
minute to decide in, and nobody in this room will go home to-morrow if
you do not tell me then."
There was for several seconds a silence that could be felt, and though
all of those who heard him knew the head of the school would keep his
word, nobody spoke. Then there was a rustle under a bed, and Niven
caught a low murmur, "Keep still. If he get's one of us he'll forget
the other."
Next moment Appleby was speaking louder. "I'm here, sir," he said.
The master lowered his candle as something wriggled out from under the
cot, and then swung up the strap when Appleby stood very straight before
him in his night gear.
"Where is Niven? It was you who took him away?" he said.
"Yes, sir," said Appleby. "I did, but he came back all right."
"Very good!" said the master. "You seem to be proud of it. Hold out
your hand."
Appleby glanced at him, and did not move for a second or two while he
thought rapidly. He did not like what he saw in his master's eyes, and
now he had delivered his comrades it was time to shift for himself. He
and Niven were leaving school early on the morrow, and he fancied he
might escape if he could tide through the next ten minutes, because the
head of the school had a good deal to attend to on the last night. The
door was also open, and not far away, the candle was flickering in the
draughts, and swinging suddenly round he darted for the opening. He
was, however, a second too late, for the great strap came down swishing,
and coiled about his shoulders, but he was in the corridor before it
rose again, and making for the head of a short stairway. The master,
however, seemed to be gaining on him, and Appleby fancied he heard the
swish of the strap when a yard away from the first step. One taste had
been sufficient, and bracing every sinew he went down in a flying leap.
As he alighted there was a thud and a crash, and the candle suddenly
went out. Still, nobody fell down the stairway, and surmising that the
pursuer missing him with the strap had driven the candle against the
wall, Appleby did not wait for a recall but went on, and into the great,
dark schoolroom underneath. There he listened until heavy footsteps
overhead seemed to indicate that the master had gone back to his room,
when creeping up another stairway, he regained the opposite end of the
corridor through a class-room. In another few minutes he had crawled
back into his bed.
"Does it hurt, Tom?" said Niven sympathetically. "I'm owing you a good
deal for this, but I know you don't like that kind of talk--and did you
forget the duck?"
Appleby laughed softly, partly to check the groan, for there was a
horrible tingling round his shoulders.
"I've had a lighter tap, but I've got the duck. It's here under the
bed," he said.
*CHAPTER II*
*OUT OF DOCK*
Appleby went home with Niven next morning, as he had done once or twice
before, for he had no home to go to, or relations who seemed anxious to
invite him anywhere. Mr. Niven was a prosperous Liverpool merchant who
had, however, made his own way in the world, and he and his wife had
taken a liking to the quiet, friendless lad. Chriss Niven also wrote to
his mother every week, and, though Appleby did not know this, had
mentioned more than one difficulty out of which his comrade had pulled
him.
It was a week later when Appleby, who had slipped away from the rest,
sat somewhat moodily in a corner of a little ante-room opening out of a
large one that was brilliantly lighted. The chords of a piano rang
through the swish of dresses, patter of feet, and light-hearted
laughter, for it was Mrs. Niven's birthday, and she had invited her
son's and daughter's friends to assist in its celebration. Appleby was
fond of music, and he drummed with his fingers on the arm of his chair,
and now and then glanced wistfully towards the doorway.
Under the glances of bright eyes that seemed to find his clumsiness
amusing, and amidst the dainty dresses, he had grown horribly conscious
that his clothes were old and somewhat shabby. The fact had not
troubled him before, but he had never been brought into contact with
pretty girls of his own age hitherto.
Niven, however, always looked well, and Appleby sighed once or twice as
he watched him, and found it hard not to envy him. Chriss could do
everything well, and he was to sail south in a great iron merchant ship
by and by. Appleby had lived beside the warm tropic sea in his
childhood and had loved it ever since, but now, when the sight of the
blue uniform of his friend stirred up the old longing so that his eyes
grew almost dim, he knew that he was to begin a life of distasteful
drudgery in an office. Presently Mr. Niven, who had a lean face and
keen dark eyes, came in.
"All alone, Tom. Have the girls frightened you?" he said with a smile.
"Well, sir," said Appleby quietly, "you see, when I tried to turn over
the music for Miss Lester I couldn't quite guess the right time and it
only worried her, while it didn't seem much use to stand about in
everybody's way. I'm going back when they start a game."
Mr. Niven nodded, for the unembarrassed gravity of the answer pleased
him. "That's right. There's very little use in pretending one can do
things when one can't," he said. "And you are going into business, eh!
I fancy, however, that Chriss told me you wanted to go to sea."
"Yes," said Appleby with a reluctance that did not escape the listener.
"Still, it seems all the owners ask a good big premium, and of course
there is nobody to lend me the money. The little my father left was
spent on my education, and my guardian writes me that he has heard of an
office where I could earn enough to keep me."
"How did you know they wanted a premium?" asked Mr. Niven.
"Because I went round all the shipowners' offices I could find in the
directory, sir," said Appleby.
The merchant nodded gravely to hide his astonishment. "Your father died
abroad, and your mother too?" he said.
"Yes, sir," said Appleby quietly. "At Singapore. I can only just
remember them. I was sent back to England when I was very young--and
never saw either of them again."
Mr. Niven noticed the self-control in the lad's face as well as the
slight tremble in his voice which would not be hidden. It was also if
somewhat impassive a brave young face, and there was a steadiness that
pleased him in the grave, grey eyes, he wished his own son looked as
capable of facing the world alone.
"And you would still like to go to sea? It is a very hard life," he
said.
Appleby smiled. "Isn't everything a little hard, sir, when you have no
friends or money?"
"Well," said Mr. Niven dryly, "it not infrequently is, and I found it
out at your age, though not many youngsters do. Who taught it you?"
Appleby looked a trifle confused. "I," he said slowly, "don't quite
know--but it seems to make things a little easier now. Of course I did
want to go to sea, but I know it's out of the question."
The merchant looked at him curiously. "You will probably be very
thankful by and by, but hadn't you better go back to the others? We'll
have a talk again."
Appleby went out to take part in a game, and Mr. Niven sat looking
straight before him thoughtfully until his wife came in.
"They are getting on excellently, and I am glad the affair is a success,
because it is difficult to please young people now-a-days, and I want
Chriss to have only pleasant memories to carry away with him," she said.
She glanced towards the doorway with a little wistfulness in her eyes as
Chriss passed by holding himself very erect while a laughing girl
glanced up at him, and Mr. Niven guessed her thoughts.
"It will be his own fault if he hasn't," he said with a smile. "It was,
however, the other lad I was thinking of."
Mrs. Niven sat down and gazed at the fire for almost a minute
reflectively. "You have had an answer from that relative of his?"
The merchant nodded. "To-day," he said. "He is evidently not disposed
to do much for the lad, and has found him an opening in the office of a
very third-rate firm. Appleby does not like the prospect, and from what
I know of his employers I can sympathize with him."
"He has no other friends. I asked him," said Mrs. Niven. "Jack, I can't
help thinking we owe a good deal to that lad, and you know I am fond of
him. He has always taken Chriss's part at Sandycombe, and you will
remember he thrashed one of the bigger boys who had been systematically
ill-using him. Then there was another little affair the night before
they left the school. Chriss told Millicent, though he didn't mention
it to me."
"Nor to me," said Mr. Niven. "A new, senseless trick, presumably?"
The lady smiled a little as she told the story of Jimmy's duck. "The
point is that the plan was Chriss's, but when they were found out
Appleby took the punishment," she said. "Now I scarcely fancy every lad
would have done that, or have been sufficiently calm just then to
remember that the master, who it seems was very busy, would probably be
content when he had laid his hands on one of them. It was also a really
cruel blow he got."
"Did he tell you?" said Mr. Niven dryly.
"No," said the lady. "That was what pleased me, because though I tried
to draw him out about it he would tell me nothing, but a night or two
ago I remembered there were some of his things that wanted mending. The
lad has very few clothes, but he is shy and proud, and I fancied I could
take what I wanted away and replace it without him noticing. Well, he
was fast asleep, and I couldn't resist the temptation of stooping over
him. His pyjama jacket was open, and I could see the big, purple weal
that ran right up to his neck."
"If he knew, he would never forgive you," said Mr. Niven with a little
laugh. "But what did they do with the duck? Chriss would certainly
have forgotten it."
"Appleby brought it away, and gave it to some poor body in Chester,"
said Mrs. Niven.
"That was the one sensible part of the whole affair, but I want to know
why you told me."
"Well," said the lady slowly, "you know he wants to go to sea, and I
feel sure his relative would be only too glad to get rid of him. Now it
wouldn't be very difficult for you to get him a ship almost without a
premium."
"A ship?" said Mr. Niven with a little smile.
"Yes," said the lady. "Chriss's ship. Chriss is--well, you know he is
just a trifle thoughtless."
"I fancy you mean spoiled," said her husband. "Still, as usual, you are
right. It is quite probable that Chriss will want somebody with a
little sense behind him. Going to sea in a merchant ship is a very
different kind of thing from what he believes it is."
Mrs. Niven sighed. "Of course. Still, about Appleby?"
"Well," said her husband smiling, "I think I could tell you more when I
have had a talk with the owners to-morrow."
He nodded as he went away, and it was next afternoon when he sat talking
with an elderly gentleman in a city office.
"We would of course be willing to take a lad you recommended," said the
latter. "Still, I was not altogether pleased to hear that my partner
had promised to put your son into the _Aldebaran_."
"No?" said Mr. Niven with a twinkle in his eyes. "Now I fancied you
would have been glad of the opportunity of obliging me."
The other man looked thoughtful. "To be frank, I would sooner have had
the son of somebody we carried less goods for," said he. "With the
steamers beating us everywhere we have to run our ships economically,
and get the most out of our men, and I accordingly fancy that while it
would not have made him as good a seaman, your son would have been a
good deal more comfortable as one of the new cadet apprentices on board
a steamer."
Mr. Niven smiled dryly. "I have no great wish to make my lad a seaman.
The fact is, there's a tolerably prosperous business waiting for him,
but in the meanwhile he will go to sea, and it seems to me that the best
thing I can do is to let him. He will probably be quite willing to
listen to what I have to tell him after a trip or two, and find out
things I could never teach him on board your vessel."
"Well," said the shipowner with a little laugh, "it is often an
effective cure as well as a rough one."
Mr. Niven left the office with a document in his pocket, and on
Christmas morning Appleby found a big, blue envelope upon his breakfast
plate.
"I wonder what is inside it," said Mrs. Niven.
Appleby sighed. "It has a business appearance," he said. "It will be
to tell me when I'm to go to the office."
"Hadn't you better open it?" said Mrs. Niven with a glance at her
husband, and there was silence while Appleby tore open the envelope.
Then the colour crept into his face, and his fingers trembled as he took
out a document.
"I can't understand it," he said. "This seems to be an apprentice's
commission--indentures--for me. The ship is the _Aldebaran_."
There was a howl of delight from Chriss, and a rattle as he knocked over
his coffee, but Appleby sat still, staring at the paper, while belief
slowly replaced the wonder in his eyes. Then he rose up, and his voice
was not even as he said, "It is real. I am to go in the _Aldebaran_. I
have to thank you, sir, for this?"
Mr. Niven laughed. "No, my lad," he said. "It was my wife's doing, and
if you are sorry by and by you will have her to blame."
Appleby turned to the lady, and his eyes were shining. "It's almost too
much," he said. "Chriss and I are going together. It is everything I
could have hoped for."
Mrs. Niven smiled, though there was a little flush in her face. "Sit
down and get your breakfast before Chriss goes wild and destroys all the
crockery," she said.
Chriss laughed uproariously. "Crockery!" he said. "If we'd been at
Sandycombe we'd have smashed every pane in the Head's conservatory.
Tom, it's--oh, it's jim-bang, blazing, glorious!"
That was the happiest Christmas Appleby had ever spent, and he
remembered it many a time afterwards when he kept his lonely watch
peering into the bitter night from plunging forecastle and spray-swept
bridge, or while he clung to the slanted topsail yard clawing at the
canvas that banged above him in the whirling snow.
Then, when he knew the reality, he could smile a little at his boyish
dream, but that day he only felt his blood tingle and every fibre in him
thrill in answer to the calling of the sea. He was English, and the
spirit which had from the beginning of his nation's history driven out
hero and patriot, as well as cutthroat slaver and privateer, to scorch,
and freeze, and suffer, do brave things, and some that were shameful,
too, and with it all keep the red flag flaunting high in symbol of
sovereignty, was in him also. All that day shield-ringed galley,
caravel, towering three-decker, steel-sheathed warship, and ugly cargo
tramp sailed through his visions, and they had for a background palms
and coral beaches, mountains rolled in snow cloud, and the blink of
frozen seas. They and their crews' story were a part of his
inheritance, because, although the times have changed and canvas is
giving place to steam, English lads have not forgotten, and the sea is
still the same.
Appleby, however, had commenced to realize that going to sea is not all
luxury when he stood on the _Aldebaran's_ sloppy deck one bleak morning
in February. It was drizzling, and the light was dimmed by a smoky haze,
while the ship was foul all over with black grime from the coaling
staithes and the dust that had blown across her from a big elevator
hurling up Indian wheat. It was also very raw, and Niven's face was
almost purple with the cold, while the moisture glistened on his new
uniform. A few bedraggled women and a cluster of dripping men stood on
the dock wall above them. Other men tumbled dejectedly about the
forecastle, falling over the great wet hawsers, while one or two who had
crawled out of the mate's sight lay rather more than half-asleep in the
shadow beneath it.
A grey-haired man with a sour face paced up and down the poop, raising
one hand now and then when a dock official shouted, while Appleby sprang
aside when another man he spoke to came down the poop-ladder and along
the deck in long, angry strides. He wore a woolly cloth cap,
knee-boots, and a very old pilot-coat, and he had a big, coarse face,
with heavy jawbone and cruel eyes. Still, the very way he put his feet
down denoted strength, and Appleby noticed the depth of his chest and
the spread of his shoulders. Niven, who had not seen him, did not move
in time, and the man flung him backwards.
"Out of the way!" he said.
Niven's face was flushed when he recovered his balance, and there was an
angry flash in his eyes as he watched the man plunge into the shadow
below the forecastle. In another moment several figures came scrambling
out of it, and went up the ladder as for their lives, with the man in
the pilot-coat close behind.
"If that's the new mate he looks more like a prize-fighter than a
sailor," said Niven. "How does he strike you, Tom?"
"I think he's a brute," said Appleby quietly.
They said nothing further, for that was their first acquaintance with
the under-side of life at sea, and their thoughts were busy, while in
another minute the mate looking in their direction signed to them, and
it did not appear advisable to keep a man of his kind waiting.
"Give these beasts a hand," he said when they stood among the seamen on
the sloppy forecastle. "You can't be more useless than they are,
anyway."
Niven stooped, and clawed disgustedly at the great wet hawser behind the
swaying men, and one of them, who was dark-haired and sallow, glanced
over his shoulder when the mate swung away.
"Ah, _cochon_!" he said.
Another, who had tow-hair, stood up and stretched his stalwart limbs.
"Der peeg! Oh, yes. Dot vas goot," he said. "I tink der vas some
troubles mit dot man soon."
A little man with high cheek bones and curious half-closed eyes loosed
his grasp upon the rope and laughed softly. He also said something to
himself, but as it was Finnish neither Appleby nor Niven were much the
wiser.
It, however, occurred to them that the language they had listened to was
not quite what one would have expected to hear on board an English ship.
There were a few Englishmen on board her, but they did not talk, and for
the most part leaned up against anything handy, or slouched aimlessly
about looking very unfit for work, which was not altogether astonishing
considering the fashion in which they had spent the previous night.
Still the hawser was paid out at last, and Appleby stood up breathless,
smeared with slime and coal-dust when the ropes astern fell with a
splash, and there was a hoot from the bustling little tug. Somebody
roared out orders on the quay above, paddles splashed, and the lad felt
his heart give a curious little throb as the _Aldebaran_ slowly
commenced to move. She was a big iron barque loaded until her scuppers
amidships were apparently only a foot or two from the scum of the dock.
He stood forward behind the maze of wire rope about the jibboom, which
was not yet run out, on the forecastle, but just below him this broke
off, and the deck ran aft sunk almost a man's height between the iron
bulwarks to the raised poop at the opposite end of the ship. Half-way
between stood a little iron house, and down the middle of the deck rose
the three great masts, the last and smallest of them, springing from the
poop. Behind it a man in shining oilskins was spinning the wheel. The
deck looked very long and filthy, for the wheat-dust and the coal-dust
were over everything, and bales, and boxes, and cases strewn amidst the
straggling lengths of rope.
Then he heard a fresh shouting, and saw that the bowsprit was already
raking through the open gate of the dock, and there were faces smiling
down on him from the wall above.
"Chriss," he said, "look up."
Niven did, and Appleby swung his cap off when a hoarse and somewhat
spiritless cheer went up. Mr. Niven was shouting something he could not
catch, Mrs. Niven was smiling down at them with misty eyes, and the very
pretty girl at her side waving a handkerchief.
Appleby glanced at his comrade out of the corner of his eyes and saw
that Chriss's face had grown unusually red. Still, he was shouting
lustily, and swinging his cap, while in the silence that followed the
cheer a hoarse voice rose up--
Blow the men down,
Blow the men down,
Oh, give us time
To blow the men down.
There was another scream from the whistle, and a roar from the mate, and
while the last ropes were cast off the two lads ran aft along the deck.
Paddles splashed, ropes slid through the water, and while the red ensign
thrice swung up and sank above their heads the _Aldebaran_ slid out into
the Mersey. Once more the voices rang out hoarsely in farewell, and
then while the groups on the quay grew blurred and dim they were sliding
away with the ebb-tide into the haze and rain. Niven looked astern
until the speck of waving handkerchief was lost to him, and then turned
to Appleby with a little gulp.
"That's the last of them!" he said. "They're going back to dinner, and
we--now I wonder what we're going to out there."
He pointed vaguely with a hand that shook a little across the dismal
slate-grey waters beyond the bows, but Appleby understood him, for it
was the unknown that was filled as yet with great and alluring
possibilities the jibboom pointed to. Yet deep down within him he felt
as Niven did, a regret and a yearning after the things he had left
behind. It was very cold and wet on the _Aldebaran's_ deck.
*CHAPTER III*
*DOWN CHANNEL*
The first day at sea is seldom very pleasant to anybody, especially on
board a sailing ship, and the one the lads had looked forward with
bright hopes to, dragged by dismally. For an hour or two painted buoy
and rolling red lightship came crawling back towards them out of the
rain, and then when the last of the Lancashire sandhills had faded over
their starboard hand, there was only smoky cloud before them and a grey
sea, across which little white ripples splashed.
Still, the tug was powerful and hauled them steadily along with a
rhythmical splash and tinkle at the bows that rose and fell a little,
and a muddy wake streaked with froth astern. Once or twice they caught
a blink of the hills of Wales, but the vapours that unrolled a trifle
closed in again, and the lads were glad they had not much opportunity
for looking about them. There were huge ropes to be coiled up and
stowed away, bales and cases to be put below, the jibboom to be rigged
out, decks washed and everything cleaned down, and while the drizzle
blew about them they stumbled amidst the litter and got in everybody's
way. Now and then a seaman laughed at them or another growled. One or
two they offered to assist shoved them aside, and it commenced to dawn
upon Chriss Niven for the first time that he was of very little use in
the busy world. The knowledge was not pleasant, but it was probably
good for him.
Then the daylight died out, and while now and then coloured lights crept
up ahead and grew dim again behind, one after another long streamers of
brilliance whirled up across the sea. They, too, grew brighter,
flashed, and blinked, and flickered, and faded away, and Appleby grew
more chilly when he could find nothing more to do, until at last he
sighed with contentment when somebody told him to go into the deckhouse
if he wanted any tea.
When he entered it he saw a lamp that smoked a good deal swinging from a
blackened iron beam, and two lads a little older than himself sitting on
their sea-chests with enamelled plates on their knees, and a great can
of steaming tea before them. They were just out of port, and having
brought their own things they feasted for once royally on fresh bread
and butter, sardines and marmalade. One of them who had a pleasant face
filled up Niven's pannikin, and pointed to the bread.
"Wire in. You'll not have the chance very long," he said. "It's your
job to go to the galley and bring the senna in, but we have let you off
this time. I'd take those things you're wearing off, if I was you. We
don't dress like gunboat commanders on board the _Aldebaran_."
"You brought this grub yourselves. They don't feed you very well," said
Appleby, and the others laughed.
"No," said one. "None of the _Aldebarans_ would get a prize at a cattle
show, and you'd be glad to steal the dog's dinner in a week or two, only
we haven't got one. You see a dog can't live on nothing as we're almost
expected to do, and the old man's too mean to waste food on anything
that can't handle sail."
"What's he like apart from his stinginess?" asked Niven.
"Well," said one of the others, "I have sailed with worse--a little--but
the old man don't count for very much, anyway, because it's the mate who
runs the ship, and the one we've got now's a terror."
"He's a pig-faced Geordie with a tiger's heart. I'd sooner live with a
shark," said a lad who sat in a corner. "Hadn't been out two hours when
he pitched one of the fellows forward down the hold. Of course it was
tolerably full, and he didn't fall very far."
"What did the man do?" asked Appleby.
"Crawled away out of sight, and went to sleep--of course," said the
first speaker; "none of them will be much good until to-morrow, but
there'll be a circus or two on board this packet before we fetch
Vancouver."
It was not very encouraging, but it was evident that they must make the
best of it, and Appleby solaced himself with a long draught from his
pannikin. The tea was hot and sweet at least, though there was very
little else to recommend it, and it and the crumbly bread that tore
beneath the knife put a little warmth and vigour into him. There was
very little of the loaf left when all were contented, and following the
example of the others, he and Niven crawled into their shelf-like bunks.
Appleby flung off his jacket only because Lawson the eldest lad warned
him that he might be wanted at any moment, but though his clothes were
wet and his straw mattress might have been more cosy, he was glad to
feel the warmth begin to creep back into his chilled limbs. The lamp
creaked dolefully above him as it swung to and fro, casting a brightness
that flickered and vanished on the brass of the ports. Moisture stood
beaded on the iron beams, and the wooden floor was wet, while now and
then one of the big sea-chests groaned as it moved a little. Nothing
was quite what Appleby had expected, but he did not think there was
anything to be gained by mentioning it, and his eyes were growing dim
when a shout roused him. Lawson was out of his berth in a moment and
struggling into a black oilskin.
"You should have had yours handy, but you'll have to turn out without
it. They're getting sail on to her," hee said.
It seemed very black and cold when Appleby went out into the rain again.
The wind had evidently freshened, and sang through the maze of cordage
above him with a doleful wailing, while as he peered into the darkness a
burst of bitter spray beat into his eyes. It was almost a minute before
he could see again, and then he made out the reeling lights of the tug
with a row of paler ones behind them, and not far away a great whirling
blaze.
"That's the Skerries," said Lawson, who appeared at his elbow.
"Yonder's Holyhead. Wind's freshening out of the south-east, and she'll
about fetch Tuskar on a close jam down channel."
Appleby did not understand very much of this, but he had little time to
wonder as to its meaning, for the mate went by just then, and Lawson
vanished into the darkness when his voice rang out, "Fore and main
topsails. Forward there, loose the jibs."
Dark objects went by at a floundering run, and Appleby followed some of
them to the foremost shrouds which ran spreading out with the rattlings
across them from the lower mast-head to the rail. He had swung himself
up on to it, and was glancing down at the leaping foam below, when
somebody grabbed him by the arm, and next moment he was staggering
across the deck.
"You'll go up there when you're told," the mate's voice said. "We want
a good deal more work out of you before you're drowned."
"He's a pig," said Niven, appearing close by, and then sank back into
the shadow when a big hand reached out in his direction, while presently
the two found themselves pulling and hauling amidst a group of swaying
figures about the foot of the foremast. It ran up into the darkness
black and shadowy, and dark figures were crawling out on the long yard
above them that stretched out into the night, while there was a groaning
and rattling that drowned the wailing of the wind.
"Gantlines!" said somebody. "A pull on the lee-sheet. Overhaul your
clew," and black folds of canvas blew out and banged noisily above them.
Then while the men chanted something as they rose and fell, the flapping
folds slowly straightened out, and Niven looking up saw the topsail
stretch into a great shadowy oblong. Then the men upon its yard seemed
to claw at the next one, and there was more banging and thrashing as it
rose, while the tug's whistle hooted, and hoarse shouts fell from the
darkness and mingled with those from the poop.
"Forward," roared somebody. "Get the jibs on to her."
Neither Niven nor Appleby knew whether this referred to them or what
they were expected to do, but there was nobody to tell them, so they
followed two men forward, and stood panting a moment on the forecastle.
It was rising and falling sharply now, for a long swell was running up
channel, and they could dimly see a man crawling out upon the jibboom.
This time they did not attempt to follow him, and when somebody drove
them down the ladder a figure in oilskins thrust a rope into their
hands.
"Hang on while I sweat it up," it said.
Appleby did not understand the manoeuvre, but when the man caught the
rope beneath a pin and they took up the slack he gave them at every
backward swing, a long triangular strip of canvas ceased banging, and
the lads felt they were doing something useful when presently a second
one rose into the blackness. Then they stood gasping, and watched the
lights of the tug slide by. They could see the white froth from her
paddles and the rise and fall of the black hull, while the voice of her
skipper came ringing across the water.
"Good voyage!" he said. "You'll fetch Tuskar without breaking tack."
The tug went by, and Niven set his lips when with a farewell hoot of her
whistle she vanished into the blackness astern. She was going back to
Liverpool, and would be there before the morrow, while when another day
crept out of the rain he would be only so much farther from home. He
was not exactly sorry he had come, but by no means so sure that the sea
was the only calling for Englishmen as he had been. Then the bulwarks
they leaned upon lurched beneath them, and he was sensible that Appleby
was speaking.
"She's starting now. Look at her. This is good, after all," he said.
Niven looked, and saw that black tiers of canvas had clothed the masts,
though their upper portions still projected above it. They were also
slanting, and the deck commenced to slope beneath him, while the long
iron hull took on life and motion. There was a roar beneath the bows
which rose and fell with a leisurely regularity, a swing and dip of the
sloppy deck, and the spray began to blow in little stinging clouds over
the forecastle. The wind also grew sharper, and at last Niven laughed
excitedly as he felt the _Aldebaran_ sweep away faster and faster into
the night.
"Oh, yes," he said. "Now one can forget the other things."
"She's lying up close," said Lawson, who came by. "Still, I'm glad the
old man doesn't want the topgallants on her yet. Those are the next
higher sails, and she's a very wet ship when you drive her. Look out.
She's beginning her capers now."
As he spoke the bows dipped sharply, and from the weather side of the
forecastle a cloud of spray whirled up. It blew in long wisps to
leeward, struck with a patter along the rail, and before Niven, whose
face was streaming, could shake himself, a rush of very cold water
sluiced past him ankle-deep. Then the long hull heaved beneath him, and
lurched forward faster still.
"I'm wetter than I was when we found Jimmy's duck, but this is great.
She's just tearing through it," he said.
As he spoke a sing-song cry came out of the spray that whirled about the
dipping forecastle, "Steamer's masthead light to starboard, sir."
Appleby, glancing over his right hand, saw a blink of yellow radiance
beyond the swelling curves of the jibs. It was rising higher rapidly,
and while he watched it, a speck of green flickered out beneath. Then a
deep, organ-toned booming broke through the humming of the wind, and he
saw a dark figure which he fancied was the mate swing up and down the
poop, and another behind it stand rigid at the wheel.
"One of the Liverpool mailboats doing twenty knots, and it isn't any
wonder their skippers are nervous when they meet a sailing-ship coming
down channel," said Lawson at his side.
Then somebody gave an order on the _Aldebaran's_ poop, and though it was
not the usual one, any English sailor would have understood it. As it
happened, however, the man who held the wheel was not a Briton, and next
moment Appleby felt the ship swing round a trifle.
"Jimminy!" gasped Lawson. "The Dutchman's going to ram us right across
her."
Next moment there was a bewildering roar from the whistle, and ringed
about with lights the great bulk of the liner sprang out of the night.
Towering high with her long rows of deckhouses punctured with specks of
brilliancy and her two great funnels black against the sky, she was
apparently heading straight for them.
Appleby saw all this in a second while he held his breath, and then
there was a scuffle on the _Aldebaran's_ poop. Somebody sprang towards
the wheel, there was a thud, and a man reeled away from it, while high
up in the darkness, canvas banged as the _Aldebaran_ once more swerved a
trifle. As she did so a man came staggering down the poop ladder, and
with the white froth seething about her the liner swept by. Appleby
gasped, and felt that he was shaking, while he saw that Lawson's face
was a trifle white by the yellow glow that came out of one of the poop
windows.
Then there was a roaring of orders, rattle of blocks, and hauling at
ropes, and a curious silence by contrast when the _Aldebaran_ swung
forward with a springy lurch again, and Appleby saw the man who had come
down the ladder, sitting apparently half-dazed upon the deck. His face
was bleeding.
"Der port und der starboard I know. Also der loof, and keep her away,
but der pinch her up I know not, und now I am very seeck," he said.
"I shouldn't wonder if he was," said Lawson dryly. "Still, though that's
how accidents happen, it wasn't the stupid beggar's fault he didn't
understand pinch her up. The old man wanted him to screw her a little
nearer the wind, and luff, or a little higher would have been the usual
thing."
"Pinch!" said the seaman. "I not know him, but oop I hear, und I oop
mit him."
"And he'd have slung us across the liner's bows if the mate hadn't been
too quick for him," said Lawson. "The fellow's head must be made of
iron or that smack would have killed him. Well, these things will
happen when you're fresh from port."
Appleby and Niven were glad to crawl into their berths again when the
watch was over, and neither of them said anything, though that was not
because they were not thinking. It was evident that going to sea was
not quite all they had fancied it would be, and they had an unpleasant
recollection of the Dutchman's bleeding face, and other tokens of the
mate's temper. Still, they were tired and drowsy, and in another few
minutes Appleby was sleeping too soundly even to dream of slavers and
pirates as he had not infrequently done at Sandycombe. Niven, however,
tossed and groaned, for his head was hot, and everything seemed to be
spinning round, but at last the blinking light faded, and slumber
banished the distressful nausea that tormented him.
There was a greyness low down to the eastwards when, swathed in
streaming oilskins now, they stood where there was a little shelter
beneath the weather-rail next morning. It was raining heavily, but the
sky was no longer covered by the smoky haze, and here and there a patch
of pale indigo showed between the streaks of driving cloud. The lads
could see the white-flecked sea tops heave against it, and the rows of
straining staysails, and great oblongs of the topsails across the masts,
sharp and black above them as if cut out of ebony. They were not,
however, especially interested in anything just then, for the
_Aldebaran_ was pitching close-hauled into a short head sea, and Appleby
felt unpleasantly dizzy. Niven also clung very tightly to the rail, and
his face, so far as it could be seen, was of a curious greyish-green,
while he gasped each time the barque dipped her nose viciously and sent
a cloud of spray blowing all over her.
Then for some ten minutes there was a deluge which blotted everything
out, and they could only hear the roar of the rain. It ceased suddenly,
and was followed by a great whirling of cloud, while the streaks of blue
grew larger, and the topsails became grey instead of black as the light
came through. The wind had also almost gone, but Appleby could see the
figure of a man upon the poop with his head turned aft as though looking
for something. In another minute he stood at the top of the ladder
shouting orders, and the deck was suddenly dotted with scrambling men.
They gathered in little groups about the feet of the masts and along the
rail, and became busy flinging down coils of rope. Somebody shoved one
into Niven's hands, and he and Appleby hauled among the rest as the long
yards swung round until they were square across the vessel, and then
pointed a trifle towards the other side of her. There was a banging and
rattling overhead as the staysails came down, and a man laughed when the
_Aldebaran_ lay rolling in a momentary calm.
"It's not easy to pull a Geordie's tail when he's asleep," he said.
"And you'd better go round the other road if he has a fancy you've got a
bone."
Niven understood the speech was a compliment to the mate's watchfulness.
"What is he making us do this for?" he asked.
"Well," said the seaman good-humouredly, "you'll find out these things
by and by. Now we were working down channel close-hauled with the wind
south-east over our port bow, but it has dropped away with the rain.
The mate doesn't wait to see if another one will catch us with topsails
aback, because he smells it coming, and it will be screaming behind us
out of the north-west presently."
As he spoke one of the topsails swelled out, flapped and banged, then
other great oblongs of canvas ceased their rustling too, and a flash of
brilliant green swept athwart the sea. A patch of brass blinked in the
sudden brightness, the rigging commenced to hum, and the _Aldebaran_
moved, while once more the hoarse voice rose from the poop.
"Topgallants," it said, and then after a string of words Niven could not
catch, "Main royal."
Instantly there was a bustle. Men went up the shrouds, swung high on
the yards, letting little coils of rope run down, and a third big tier
of sailcloth swelled out on either mast. Chain rattled, running wire
screamed, the _Aldebaran_ ceased rolling, and Appleby could see the sea
smitten into white smoke rush past while he endeavoured to shake the
kinks out of very hard and swollen rope. In the meanwhile the voice
rose from the poop again, and when he had time to look about him two
great pyramids of sail with a third of different shape behind covered
the _Aldebaran_ from the last feet of her mastheads to her spray-swept
rail.
Then Appleby drew in his breath with a little gasp of wonder and
delight. The towering tiers of canvas that gleamed a silvery grey now
were rushing as fast as the clouds that followed them across blue lakes
of sky. The great iron hull had become an animate thing, for there was
life in every swift upward lurch and easy swing, and when he saw the
foam that roared away in ample folds about the bows unite again astern
and swirl straight back athwart the flashing green towards the horizon
he realized for a few moments all the exhilaration of swift motion.
Presently, however, he was sensible of a horrible qualm under his belt,
and looked at his hands with a little groan--one of them was bleeding
from the rasp of the ropes, and the other swollen and more painful than
if it had been beaten. He stood still for another second or two
endeavouring to convince himself that there was nothing unusual going on
inside him, and then staggered dizzily to the leeward rail. He found
Niven there already, and for the next few minutes two very unhappy lads
gazed down at the foam that whirled and roared beneath them as the
_Aldebaran_ swept out from the narrow seas before the brave
north-wester.
*CHAPTER IV*
*A LESSON IN SEAMANSHIP*
It was a fine Sunday, and the _Aldebaran_ rolling southwards lazily over
a dazzling sea when Niven and Appleby lay on the warm deck with their
shoulders against the house listening to Lawson who sat in the doorway
reading. Pleasant draughts flickered about them as the warm wind flowed
under the great arch of the mainsail's foot, and above it the sunlit
canvas climbed, tier on tier, to the little royals swaying slowly
athwart the blue. The barque was sliding forward on an even keel, but
now and then she lifted her weather side with a gentle roll, and a
brighter glare was flung up by the shining brine. Behind them the blue
smoke of the galley whirled in little puffs, and glancing aft Appleby
was almost dazzled by a flash from the twinkling brass boss of the
wheel. Then when the poop went down he could see the figure of the
helmsman forced up against the iridescent blueness of the sea.
Appleby wore a thin singlet and slippers, duck trousers and a jacket of
the same material that had once been white and was a nice grey now.
Niven's things were cleaner, but one rent trouser leg had been
inartistically sewn up with seaming twine, and neither of them looked
very like the somewhat fastidious youngsters who had once found fault
with their rations in Sandycombe School. Their faces were bronzed from
their foreheads to their throats, their hands were ingrained as a
navvy's, and almost as hard, and they could by this time have eaten
anything there was nourishment in.
"There's no use reading that stuff to us. We can't take it in," said
Niven.
Lawson grinned at Appleby. "A little thick in the head?" he said.
"No," said Niven. "My head's as good as those most people have, anyway.
I was top of the list almost every term when I was at school."
Lawson's smile grew broader. "That's a bad sign," he said. "Now I
never knew how much I didn't know until I came to sea, and you don't
seem to have got that far yet. You see, there's a good deal you want to
forget."
"Well," said Niven, "forgetting's generally easy. What would you teach a
fellow who wanted to go to sea?"
Lawson rubbed his head. "How to get fat on bread and water would come
in useful for one thing," he said. "Then it would be handy to know just
when to say nothing when you're kicked, and when it would be better to
put your foot down and answer with your fist. You see, if you do either
of them at the wrong time you're apt to be sorry."
"Appleby knows that already," said Niven, whose eyes twinkled as he
glanced at his friend.
Appleby made a grimace, and Lawson laughed.
"Then it's a good deal more than you do, though I expect the mate will
teach you the first of it," he said.
"Now, when Cally put soft-soap in your singlet and sewed your trousers
up you should have laughed fit to split yourself, as Appleby did. Cally
tarred his hair for him, and there's some in yet, but any one would have
fancied that he liked it."
Niven wriggled a little. "Oh, shut up! That's not what we want to
know," he said.
"No?" said Lawson. "Then we'll get on to the healthful art and practice
of seamanship. Am I to commence at the end, or half-way through? The
beginning will not be much use to you."
"I'll climb down," said Niven. "Made an ass of myself, as usual. Now,
do you want me to lick your boots for you? Begin at the beginning, and
make it simple."
Lawson chuckled. "You'll get on while you're in that frame of mind, my
son," he said. "Well, now, there are, generally speaking, two kinds of
sailing ships--first the fore-and-afters, examples, cutter, ketch, and
schooner, with their canvas on one side only of the mast. They're to be
described as tricky, especially when you jibe them going free, but when
you jam them on the wind they'll beat anything."
"Jam them on the wind?" said Appleby.
Lawson nodded. "Close-hauled sailing. That's what I'm coming to," he
said. "In the meanwhile there's the other kind, the one the Britisher
holds to, while the Yankee who knows how to run cheap ships smiles, the
square-riggers, examples, the ship and brig. Their sails are bent to
yards which cross the masts, and, as you have found out, you've got to
go aloft in all weathers to handle them, which is not one of their
advantages. Then we come to the modifications or crosses between them,
the barque, two masts square-rigged, fore-and-aft on mizzen, of which
the _Aldebaran_ is a tolerably poor example, topsail schooner,
brigantine, which has yards on her foremast and fore-and-aft main, and
barquentine with foremast square-rigged and two mainmasts carrying
fore-and-aft canvas, though they call the last of them the mizzen. The
other kind I didn't mention is the one that makes the money, and sails
with a screw. Got that into you?"
"Oh, yes," said Niven, yawning. "Can't you get on? I knew it all years
ago."
Lawson grinned. "Of course!" he said. "Well, I'll leave the mate to
talk to you."
He went into the deckhouse, and returned with a sheet of paper and a
little, beautifully-constructed model of a full-rigged ship. "I made it
last trip to work out questions for my examination with," he said, but
the deprecation in his bronzed face betrayed his pride, and Appleby, who
saw how tenderly he handled the model, understood. "Now we come to the
one and universal practice of sailing. I make this ring on the paper,
and you can consider it the compass, or, and it's the same thing,
one-half the globe. Here I draw two lines across it crossing each
other, and we'll mark the ends of them North, South, East, and West.
That divides the circle into four quarters, and the corners where the
lines intersect are right angles, each containing ninety degrees, or
eight points of the compass which has thirty-two in all."
He laid the paper on the deck, and when he had turned it so that the
first line run from North to South, placed the model at the upper end of
it, and twisted the yards and sails, which moved, square across the
hull. "The wind's blowing from Greenland to the South pole, and she's
going before it," he said. "Anything would sail that way--it's called
running--even a haystack, and you trim the vessel's sails whether she's
fore-and-aft or square-rigged at right angles to a line drawn down the
middle of her hull. Well, we've reached the south end of the
line--we'll say it's the south pole, and want to get back north again,
but the wind is right against us now."
He picked up the model, and twisted the yards again so that they slanted
sharply across the hull, making a small angle with its middle line.
"Now she's braced sharp up, or close hauled--every sheet's hauled in--on
the wind, and we'll start her heading north-east on the port tack. That
is, the wind's on the port side of her, though we could have started on
the opposite one heading north-west, if we had liked. Run that line
along, and you'll find it makes an angle of four points of the compass,
or forty-five degrees, with the wind, which makes it evident that by and
by you come to the edge of the first quarter of the circle at east.
Then, if we put the ship round with the wind on her opposite side, and
sail at the same angle as far again, we come back to north, where the
wind is blowing from, and when you grasp that you've got the principle
of the whole thing. With the wind behind you all sails flowing, when
you're working up against it, everything's flattened in, but you have to
remember that all vessels don't sail equally close to the wind, and
while a racing cutter will lie very close indeed, a shallow full-bowed
hooker must have it almost on her side to keep her going. That's why I
took four points as a handy example, because two tacks of forty-five
degrees would bring us back again."
"But why doesn't the wind shove her away sideways when she's
close-hauled?" asked Appleby.
Lawson nodded approval. "That shows you're following, it does," he
said. "Still it don't amount to very much if the vessel's deep, because
all of her that's in the water offers resistance to it. They all slide
off a little, and that's the leeway."
"Well," said Niven, "when the wind's so to speak almost against her,
what makes her go ahead at all?"
Lawson grinned. "What makes a kite go up against the wind? You see the
sails of a close-hauled ship make about the same angle to it as a kite
does. They didn't teach you that at school?"
"I think they did," said Appleby. "There's something very like it in
the parallelogram of forces."
"The biscuit's yours," said Lawson. "Get that into you, and you know
all the whys of sailing."
He yawned and bent over his book, repeating snatches of curious ditties
about green to green and red to red, and steamers crossing, but Appleby
remembered what he had heard, which was fortunate, because it was the
only instruction that anybody ever gave him on board the _Aldebaran_.
Then the cook banged on something in his galley, and Niven, who got up
and stretched himself, went along to bring in the tea. He came back
with a big steaming can and grinned at Appleby.
"They'll be getting very different tucker at home," he said. "Still, it
will be beastly cold and wet up there just now."
His merriment was evidently a trifle forced, and another lad who lay
poring over a book in a corner raised his head.
"Oh, shut up!" he said. "We've heard all that before, and you don't do
it very well. If I could get back into the shop the governor found me
I'd like to catch myself going to sea. Oh, great handspikes! Just
listen to the brute."
A storm of venomous language came forward from the poop, and through the
drowsy flap of canvas and stillness of the dazzling ocean there rang the
strident voice of the mate. Lawson slowly shook his head.
"She was scarcely steering, and Biddulph has let her fall off," he said.
"They've stood a good deal forward, but that mate of ours is pushing
them too far."
Then there was silence that seemed deepened by the light flap and rustle
of sailcloth and gurgle of shining brine, but the peace of the day had
gone, and the shadow which crept into the four young faces was that
which has darkened so many lives at sea. They had all been used to
discipline, and did not resent it, while it had been made evident to two
of them of late that on board a sailing ship toil that is brutal as well
as perilous is often a necessity. They would also have undertaken it
more or less cheerfully, but there had been added to it a ruthless
tyranny, and Appleby's little sigh seemed to ask the question that
downtrodden men have asked from the beginning--why such things must be?
And, for he was young, he could not find an answer.
A little breeze sprang up after sunset, and the ship was sliding faster
through a sea that blazed about her with lights of green and gold when
Appleby hung about the deck, held still and silent by something in the
harmonies of the night. There was no moon, but there was also no cloud
in the sky, and the great stars the mast-heads swayed across hung set
far back one behind the other in the blue, while the spires of canvas
towered black and sharp under their cold light. Not a cloth rustled,
but there came down from the gossamer tracery of rigging a little
musical humming that suggested the chanting of an invisible choir.
Forward a black figure was visible on the forecastle. Here and there
another showed along the dusky line of bulwarks, and now and then
Appleby could see the dark shape of the mate standing high upon the
poop. This, however, was not often, because he preferred to keep the
great shadowy mainsail between himself and it. Night and sea were still
and peaceful, and that sinister figure alone jarred upon their serenity.
Suddenly the harsh voice he feared broke the silence, and Appleby
instinctively set his lips when he saw his comrade cross the deck. It
was noticeable that Niven went at a trot, and if he had been told that
one side of the poop is usually sacred to the officer of the watch
knowing that haste was advisable he forgot. A moment or two later he
stood panting at the head of the ladder, which rose about six feet from
the deck, and the mate strode towards him with arm drawn back. Possibly
something had ruffled his temper, which was at the best a bad one, that
night.
"There are two ladders to this poop, and this will teach you which is
yours," he said.
Then before Niven could speak the arm shot out, and the breathless lad
reeled backwards with head swimming and a tingling face. The blow had
possibly not been a very cruel one, but the _Aldebaran_ swung her stern
up just then, and the opening in the rails was close behind him. He
went out through it backwards, caught his foot on the rung of the
ladder, and pitching over came down with a sickening thud on deck.
Appleby, who had seen it all, ran aft and knelt down beside him.
"Chriss, are you hurt?" he gasped.
[Illustration: "'CHRISS, ARE YOU HURT?'"]
There was no answer, and hearing a rattle on the ladder the lad looked
up, and saw the mate standing close by. He had his hands in his
pockets, but there was an unpleasant look in his face.
"Shamming. Take him forward," he said, and stooped as though about to
shake the lad who still lay motionless.
He, however, straightened himself as Appleby rose up, and stood before
him, quivering, with hand clenched and a blaze in his eyes.
"Get back! You have done enough," he said, and if Niven could have
heard it he would scarcely have recognized his comrade's voice.
"Hello!" the mate said sharply. "Were you talking to me?"
"Yes," said Appleby hoarsely, but very quietly. "And I have a little
more to tell you. You can't do these things with impunity, and we'll
have you kicked out of the Company for this."
It was not, of course, a judicious speech, but Appleby was scarcely in a
state to decide what was most fitting then. The mate moved a pace
nearer him, and his hands were out of his pockets now, but he stopped
close by Appleby, for the lad stood stiffly upright, his face grey with
passion.
"I'll make you sorry. Get him out of this," he said.
Then Niven raised himself a little, and blinked dizzily at both of them.
"I think I could get up if you helped me, Tom," he said.
Appleby shivered a little as he saw the red smear on the back of his
head, but before he moved an elderly man with a sour face and grizzled
hair came down the ladder and stopped in front of them. He glanced at
Niven and then at Appleby, but it is probable that a scene of the kind
was not quite new to him, and his face was expressionless.
"Well, what's it all about?" he said.
Appleby had but once or twice spoken to the captain, who was a grim,
silent man, and not seen very often in fine weather. Whether he was
contented with the mate's conduct was not apparent, but as usual it was
the latter who handled the ship's company.
"You had better ask the mate, sir," said Appleby. "He knocked him down
the ladder."
The skipper turned towards the other man, and the mate laughed a little.
"That's not quite right, sir," he said. "The lad can't take telling,
and he came up the wrong ladder when I sang out for him. I guessed it
was done out of impudence, and let him have it so it wouldn't hurt him
much with the flat of my hand. She gave a lurch just then that threw
him off his feet and down he went. Then this one began a rumpus, and
told me he'll have me run out of the service."
The skipper stooped over Niven. "Head's cut--at the back," he said in
an expressionless voice. "Get up, and go aft, my lad. I'll fix it for
you."
Niven rose shakily, and obeying the skipper's pointing hand walked
towards the poop with uneven steps. Then the latter looked at Appleby.
"What did he mean by that?" he said quietly.
Appleby understood the question, and though he fancied he was doing
wisely made a blunder. "I think I can do all I told him, sir," he said.
"You see, this ship is carrying Mr. Niven's goods, and one could fancy
the Company is glad to get them."
"Niven?" said the skipper, more to himself than the others. "Most of
the freight belongs to Clarke and Hall."
"They're dead," said Appleby, who had been told this. "There's only Mr.
Niven in the business now."
The skipper looked thoughtful. "Now I remember," he said as he turned
towards the mate, and stopped. "Well, this is my affair, Appleby, and
I'm the only man who can question what the mate does on board this ship.
If you do it again it will be the worse for you. Remember that."
Appleby touched his cap and moved away, and presently Niven came forward
from the poop with his head tied up. He was still pale, and moved
slowly, while he had little to tell his comrade.
"He put some stuff that smarted on the cut, but didn't ask any
questions, and told me to lie down," he said. "I'm going to do it
because I'm not myself yet. My head's all humming, and I don't seem to
want to talk."
Appleby helped him into his bunk, and then went back to his watch, while
he told Lawson all that had passed when he next had an opportunity. The
elder lad listened gravely.
"You fancy the old man believed you?" he said.
"Yes," said Appleby. "It isn't my fault if he didn't. I did my best to
make him."
Lawson shook his head. "Then I'm afraid you made a mess of things," he
said. "You see, if the old man believed you the mate would."
"Of course!" said Appleby. "That was what I wanted."
"Well," said Lawson, "it's unfortunate that you did. Now the old man's
tolerably tough, but he's not a fool, and, to give him his due, is
content with getting two men's work out of every one of the crew. He
knows the men who fill the ships up can make things nasty for the
captain, and it's quite likely he'll talk straight to the mate, though
he wouldn't to you, and that's not going to make the mate any fonder of
you and Niven."
"I was hoping it would keep him quiet," said Appleby.
"It wouldn't," said Lawson. "All that Niven's father could do would be
to get him turned out, and if the mate thought that likely he'd make it
warm for you before he went, you see. If you've any pull on the owners
it's not, as a rule, advisable to mention it at sea. It doesn't make
anybody think the better of you."
Appleby groaned. "I've been an ass again," he said. "Still, I fancied
he had killed Niven--and I had to do something."
Lawson smiled dryly. "There's only one thing anybody can do at sea, and
that's to keep his mouth shut and out of the way of trouble," he said.
"When you can't help things there's no use in kicking."
Appleby made no answer. It was a somewhat grim lesson, but it was one
that sooner or later every lad must learn, and the result of it is the
capacity for endurance which is not infrequently worth a good deal more
than courage in action.
*CHAPTER V*
*UNDER TOPSAILS*
Appleby was not long in discovering that Lawson was right. Hitherto the
mate had only stormed at him and his comrade as he did at the rest of
the vessel's company, but now he seemed to single them out for abuse
whenever he had an opportunity, and he managed to find a good many. It
was true that he attempted no further violence, but they could have
borne that better than the relentless petty persecution, for there was
scarcely a difficult or unpleasant task within their strength that the
lads were not set to do. Unpleasant duties are also by no means uncommon
on board a sailing ship.
Still, Appleby had seen that to protest was useless and likely to make
things worse, while because the mate was cunning as well as cruel it
would have been difficult to make a definite complaint even if there had
been anybody to listen to him, which, however, was not the case. So he
set his lips and bore it, and so as he could endeavoured to restrain
Niven, who would now and then break out into fits of impotent anger or
lie silent in his bunk after some fresh indignity. Had the work been
always necessary Appleby would have endeavoured to do it willingly,
though it was now and then almost disgusting, but the mate probably knew
this, and arranged things so that he should feel he was doing most of it
only to please his enemy. Grown men have been driven to
self-destruction or murderous retaliation by treatment of this kind, and
after a few weeks of it both lads felt they could endure no more.
Meanwhile the weather grew colder and the work harder. That was not the
worst time of the year for rounding Cape Horn, but they found it bad
enough, for the _Aldebaran_ met wild weather and she was loaded heavily,
while on the afternoon she lay rather more than a hundred miles to the
eastwards of the dreaded cape her crew were almost too worn out for
duty. She was then heading about south-west upon the starboard tack,
thrashing very slowly to windward under topsails, and flooding her decks
with icy water each time she poked her nose into the seas, and she did
it tolerably often, for the seas were very big. They came rolling down
to meet her out of the south-west, blue-black in the hollows, which were
streaked with foam and frothing on their crests, and Appleby would hold
his breath when one larger than its fellows rose high above the
starboard bow. Most often the _Aldebaran_ would swing up her head in
time and climb over the big wall of water with a swooping lurch, while
the spray that whirled up from her bows rattled like grapeshot into her
foretopsails and blew out in showers between the masts. Now and then,
however, she went through, and then there was a thud and roar and her
forecastle was lost from sight. It seemed a long while before she hove
it up again streaming, and every man held on to what was handiest when
the long deck was swept by torrents of icy brine. Then while frothy
wisps blew away from the forecastle and every scupper on one side
spouted she would stagger on again for perhaps ten minutes more dryly,
because the long ocean seas are by no means all equally steep and high.
Appleby and Niven were holding on, shivering with cold and wet through
in spite of their oilskins, by a pin on the weather rail, for the deck
slanted sharply and the water was washing everywhere. Glancing forward
they could see nothing but spray, and every now and then the frothing
top of a larger sea hove up against a vivid glare of green. When they
looked up, which it was not often advisable to do, they could see the
mastheads raking across a patch of hard deep blue, athwart which clouds
with torn edges whirled. There was little canvas on the slanted spars,
two jibs that ran water above the bowsprit, two topsails on either mast,
a staysail or two between them, and half the spanker on the mizzen. The
sails did not look as if they were made of flexible canvas but cast in
rigid metal.
Presently a wet man came clawing his way along, and stopped when Niven
called to him.
"Did you hear what we had made?" he said.
The man nodded, and growled at the spray which beat into his face. "The
stooard he heard the old man and the mate a-fixing it," he said. "She's
worked off about another twenty miles since noon yestidday."
Niven groaned. "Only twenty miles!" he said. "That's another week
before we can square away."
"Well," said the man with a little grim laugh, "I'd give her another
fortnight when I was at it. She'll take all that to fetch round with
this wind, any way."
The two lads looked at each other, and neither of them said anything
when in a lull between two plunges the man lurched away, but that was
because they fancied he was right and both were unwilling to admit all
that they were feeling.
They knew a good deal about close-hauled sailing now, for during four
long weeks the _Aldebaran_ had been thrashing her way to windward in the
face of stinging gales. Sometimes when the sea was a trifle smoother
she would gain a little on every tack, and then a fresh storm would come
roaring down, and when they had furled the higher sails with half-frozen
hands she would do little more than hold the wind upon her side and of
course make nothing at all in the required direction. Also they had
often to heave her to under little rags of sail with the sea upon her
bow while she blew away to leeward and lost in a few hours all they had
won the preceding day.
Always the decks were flooded, and the men wet to the skin. The galley
fire was frequently washed out, and they got cold provisions, often so
soaked with salt water that they could scarcely eat them, while when
sleep was possible they lay down as they were, all dripping, too worn
out to strip off their clothes. It would not have been advisable to
take them off in any case, for they might be turned out at any moment to
furl upper topsails or haul down staysails in a sudden freshening of the
gale. Canvas was furled and hoisted continually, because a ship will
not sail to windward through a heavy sea unless she is sternly pressed,
while her crew fight for every yard she makes.
Appleby even in his oilskins looked very gaunt and thin. His face was
hollow and bronzed by exposure to bitter wind and stinging brine, while
Niven, like many of the others, was troubled with painful sores from
sleeping in salt-stiffened clothes. Their hands were stiffened and
clawlike, their knuckles bleeding, and from the ceaseless rasp of ropes
the undersides of their fingers were very like grain-leather. Worn out
utterly and half-fed they were just holding out with the rest of the
_Aldebaran's_ company until they could thrash her far enough to the
westwards to square away and run north into better weather on the other
side of Cape Horn.
"Hallo!" said Niven presently. "That's a nasty cloud. I wonder what
fresh beastliness it's bringing us."
Appleby, glancing to windward, saw that the glaring green beyond the
seatops had faded out, and the horizon was smeared with grey. It also
seemed to be closing in upon them rapidly, and overhead a black cloud
with torn edges was swallowing up the strip of blue.
"More wind, any way. She'll scarcely bear upper topsails now," he said
with a little groan. "Still, the old man's tolerably stubborn at
carrying on."
Niven, glancing aft, could see the skipper's gaunt figure swung high
upon the poop against a frothing sea as he too glanced to windward. He
was probably as anxious as any one to get round Cape Horn, but it was
only by carrying sail to the last moment and making the most of every
lull he could hope to do it. Even as he gazed ragged ice fell pattering
along the decks, and the daylight died out leaving a grey dimness behind
it. Then for a few minutes sea and ship were hidden by the flying hail.
It cut the lads' raw knuckles until they could have cried out in agony,
thrashed their wet faces and rattled on their oilskins, while the
rigging roared above them, and twice in succession the _Aldebaran_ put
her whole forecastle in. Then a great sea foamed in almost solid over
her weather rail, and through all the uproar rang a high-pitched cry.
The words were indistinguishable as they would have been a yard away,
but the lads recognized it as the summons to shorten sail. For a minute
or two they were busy about the deck, and then while the ship swayed
over further the mate lurched by and grabbed the Dutchman, who was
working awkwardly with one hand, by the shoulder.
"Lay aloft, and give them a hand up there, you skulking hog," he said.
"Mine arm," said the seaman, "der right one, she is nod of good to me."
Appleby remembered that the fellow had badly hurt his arm, and scarcely
wondered at his reluctance to go aloft with only one hand to trust to as
he glanced above. The upper topsail had been partly lowered down, but
the loose canvas was thrashing between the yards, and these sloped down
towards the whitened sea apparently as steeply as the roof of a house.
Still, it was evident that every man was needed, for there were other
sails to be handled and the _Aldebaran_ was apparently going bodily
over. She hove her nose up for an instant, and Appleby had a momentary
glimpse of a jib that had burst its sheet thrashing itself to pieces
above the bowsprit. Then sight and hearing was lost in a cloud of
flying brine.
When he could open his eyes again he saw the mate lift his fist, and the
Dutchman glance deprecatingly at the arm that hung at his side.
"Lay aloft," said the former, "before you get a damaged head as well as
an arm."
The Dutchman shuffled towards the shrouds, and just then a half-heard
shout came down from one of the black figures on the inclined yard.
"We're beat. Send us another hand."
It was already evident to Niven that as the yard was higher than it
should have been something was foul, and he could see that unless the
men had help they would be hurled off it or the sail blown away. It was
not his especial duty, but it was no time to be particular when the
_Aldebaran_ lay swept from end to end at the mercy of the squall, and he
swung himself up into the shrouds close behind the Dutchman with Appleby
following. The wind flattened them against the rattlings as they fought
their way up, and then almost choked and blinded them as with the
swinging foot-rope against their heel and stiffened hands on the
slippery spar they crept outwards from the mast along the yard. They
were not of very much use there, indeed, most often they were in the
way, but they did what they could while the hail lashed their faces and
the drenched and stiffened canvas banged about them so that to hear
anything else was almost impossible. At times somebody shouted, but the
words were blown to leeward and quite incomprehensible.
It was their business to roll up the great flapping sail, and lash it to
the yard, but parts of it tore away from them, and blew out with a bang
like a rifle-shot every now and then, while the long wet spar they
leaned across increased the steepness of its slant. Niven glancing down
a moment fancied that the _Aldebaran's_ leeward rail was in the sea, and
saw the rigid figure on the weather side of the poop waving a hand to
them. He could, of course, hear no voice at all, but surmised the
gestures meant it was high time their work was finished. Then the
_Aldebaran_ dipped her nose into a sea, and the cloud of spray she flung
up hid everything, while in another moment a more furious gust shrieked
about them. The yard slanted still further, and he fancied it was
impossible the ship could recover.
His hands were stiffened and almost useless, his fingers were bleeding,
and his breath was spent, while as he held on helpless for a moment
there was a sound like thunder, and as a strip of canvas rent itself
from the grasp of those about him he saw the Dutchman clawing
desperately at the yard. The man slipped along it a foot or two, and
Niven, seeing his fingers sliding, remembered he had an injured arm. He
had also evidently lost his footing, for one leg was dangling, and the
lad instinctively seized his shoulder. That left him one hand to hold
on by, and he gasped with horror as he felt his fingers slipping from
the yard and saw a great sea burst into a tumultuous frothing beneath
him.
He was too cold and dazed to wonder if any of the others saw what was
happening, and could remember only that if he loosed his hold the man he
clutched would go whirling down to strike the iron bulwarks or plunge
into the sea. So he set his lips, and while his arms seemed to be
coming away from their sockets held on for a moment or two.
Then the hand he grasped the yard with slipped a trifle further, and
with a sickening horror he felt his clawlike fingers yield, but dazed,
half-blinded, and too overwrought with the struggle to think, he still
clutched the Dutchman. In another moment the hand came away altogether,
and man and boy went down.
Now a second or two earlier Appleby had noticed their peril, but could
do nothing because there was a man between them and him. He smote the
fellow's shoulder and shouted, but his words were blown away, and no one
else had eyes for anything but the banging sail. It was too late before
he could shout again, for with a little gasp he saw the two figures
whirl downwards beneath him, until, because the _Aldebaran_ lurched a
trifle just then, the smaller of them struck a big wire stay with folds
of loose canvas about it where it joined the mast, and lay for a second
or two across it. The other fell on the top of the deckhouse, and then,
while Appleby shivered, rolled off it and down on to the deck below.
Almost as this happened Niven slipped from the hauled-down staysail and
fell upon the house too, but apparently upon feet and hands together.
Then as Appleby endeavoured to get back to the mast so that he could
descend, the man nearest it grasped him and he could not pass. The lad
could not hear what he said, but he guessed its purport, and grew sick
with horror as he saw that the man was right. There were others below
to pick up the fallen if there was any life in them, and with the ship
in peril every hand was needed on the yards. Also, while that fact
might not have stopped him, he could not pass the man, who barred his
way to the mast.
So he stayed, and did what little he could among the rest, until at last
they had stowed the sail, and then went down in frantic haste, only to
be driven forward by the second mate. The latter was a kindly man, but
there are times when the injured or dying must take care of themselves
at sea, and there was still strenuous work to do. Thus at least
half-an-hour had passed, and the _Aldebaran_ was blowing sideways about
as fast as she forged ahead under lower topsails when Appleby reached
the deckhouse breathless and dripping. It was almost dark inside it,
for driving cloud had blotted the daylight out, but the swinging lamp
diffused a sickly radiance which fell on his comrade as Appleby bent
over his dripping bunk. Everything in the deckhouse was wet, as was
Niven's face, but though it was drawn and white his eyes were open.
"Not quite all smashed up yet," he said with a little smile.
Appleby felt almost dizzy with relief, and his voice shook a trifle as
he said, "But you are hurt, Chriss?"
"Well," said Niven feebly, though there was a little twinkle in his
eyes, "it wouldn't be astonishing if I was, but I think a good lie down
will put me right again. There was a big lump of the staysail under me,
and I fetched the top of the house on my hands and toes. Couldn't get
up just now, however, if I wanted to."
Appleby could think of nothing fitting to say, and patted his comrade's
shoulder while he turned his head away. His eyes were a trifle hazy,
and he felt that there are a good many things one cannot express in
speech.
"The Dutchman?" he said presently.
Niven seemed to shiver, and shook his head. "I don't know. Couldn't
take much notice of anything because I felt all in pieces myself just
then, but I saw him come down," he said. "He just seemed to crunch
up--as if he was an egg."
Lawson, who was sitting on his chest, made a gesture of impatience.
"Now you shut up and lie still," he said. "Any one would fancy you had
done enough to take a rest." Then he nodded to Appleby. "Get out. It's
quietness he wants, and it's not going to make anything any better to
remember what happened to the other fellow. I'll keep an eye on him,
and you needn't worry."
Appleby, who knew Lawson could be trusted to do this, went out, and it
was an hour or two later when he and the rest sat in the house again
over a big can of tea which the cook had by some means contrived to
supply them with. They still wore streaming oilskins, and the lamp that
swung above them cast flickers of smoky radiance across their wet faces,
while from outside came a muffled roar of wind and the crash of falling
water as the _Aldebaran_ lurched over the great smoking seas. Niven was
evidently a little better, and smiled, though his face was awry with
pain, when Appleby lifted his shoulders a little and handed him a
biscuit soaked in tea.
"It's nice yellow jellies and grapes I'd be eating if I was laid up at
home," said he.
"If you don't stop we'll make you," said one of the other lads. "Who
has got any business to talk of those things at sea? What did the old
man do to you?"
Niven grinned in a sickly fashion. "He asked me where I felt bad, and I
told him everywhere," he said. "Then he and the steward pulled the
clothes off me and prodded me with their fists. They didn't seem to
find anything broken, but I was sore all over, and I'd sooner be whacked
with a horse-girth than go through that again."
"Smacked with a horse-girth!" said Lawson, reflectively. "Now I've been
kicked--with sea boots--a good many times, but that would be a new
sensation. What does it feel like?"
"If you want to know you can ask Appleby," said Niven. "I fancy he
could tell you."
Appleby laughed, for he saw his comrade was recovering. "But what about
the Dutchman?" he said.
Lawson shook his head. "I only know the old man went forward to look at
him, and he's tolerably bad. He came down bang on his shoulder, you
see. Did the mate know he had only one arm that was any good to him,
Appleby?"
"Yes," said Appleby slowly. "He was there when the man hurt it, and
just before he went up I heard him tell him. I saw the mate double up
his fist too--and the Dutchman had to go."
There was silence for a moment or two, intensified by the roar of wind,
and the lads looked at one another with a curious grimness which seemed
out of place there in their young faces.
"If he doesn't get better it's manslaughter, any way," said somebody.
"Now we've had almost enough of this. What's to be done, Lawson?"
Lawson stared at the lamp for almost a minute before he answered. "If
the man comes round we can't do anything," he said. "Of course we and
the men could make a declaration about ill-usage at Vancouver, but the
old man would back the mate up and we'd only be quietly sat upon. If
the Dutchman dies it would be a little easier. The old man would have
to put down all about it in the log, but he'd fix it the nicest way and
then get two witnesses--the mate and the second mate--to sign it."
"Would the second mate do it?" said Appleby.
"I think he would have to," said Lawson dryly.
"Well," said one of the other lads, "where do we come in?"
"You," said Lawson, with a little, mirthless laugh, "don't come in at
all, but there's one chance yet. When the men are paid off the old man's
account of any death on board is read over, and they're asked if it's
all correct and if the man was ill-used at all. If they could only
stick to one story they'd get a hearing, and the Government would go
into the thing."
"That doesn't sound difficult," said Appleby.
Lawson shook his head. "I'm afraid it's more than they could do," he
said. "Every man would tell a different tale and get arguing with the
rest until nobody could make head or tail of it, and the skipper who
says nothing that isn't dragged out of him would come up on top again.
Still, of course, there is just a chance of them being listened to, and
that's going to make the mate a good deal nastier in the meanwhile."
Niven, who had lain silent, looked over his bunk. "He will not be nasty
to me very long. I've had enough of the brute already. One could get
ashore at Vancouver."
Lawson glanced at him impatiently. "Better shut up before you're
sorry," he said. "There's only one thing to do, and that's to leave the
old man to run the mate out quietly. He's a tolerably tough old nigger
himself, but I fancy this kind of thing is a little too much for him.
As I've told you before, there's very little use kicking about anything
when you go to sea."
Then there was once more silence as the unpleasant veracity was borne in
upon the rest. Nobody, it seemed, cared very much what became of them,
and there was no one they could appeal to. They must take what came,
and grin and bear it, however irksome it might be. The knowledge was
especially bitter to Niven, who had possibly been made too much of at
home, but Appleby had already a vague suspicion that in any walk of life
it would be much the same. Every man had rights, he knew, but he had
discovered that it is very little use to make speeches about them when
they are unobtainable, and generally wiser to wait in silence for an
opportunity and then stretch out a firm hand and take them. Some lads
find this out early, though there are men who never discover it at all,
and these are not infrequently a nuisance to everybody.
*CHAPTER VI*
*A FAIR WIND*
Niven, though severely bruised and shaken, recovered rapidly, and one
morning a fortnight after his injury sat under the partial shelter of
the weather-rail rubbing tar into a long strip of worn-out canvas with
his hands. He had more than a suspicion that the canvas would never be
used, and sitting still in a bitter wind while he dabbled his stiffened
fingers in the sticky mess was far from pleasant, but the mate
frequently found him work of that kind to do, and Niven knew that when
he gave an order it was not advisable to argue.
Appleby was sitting close beside him similarly occupied, and every now
and then a cloud of spray which swept the rail stung their faces and
rattled upon their oilskins. Icy water came on board, too, but because
they sat well aft they escaped the frothing deluges which poured over
the weather bow and sluiced down the slanted deck to lee. Here and
there a dripping man scrambled out of the way of them or clung fast to
something in the wilder lurches, for the _Aldebaran_ was still hammering
to windward under scanty sail.
There was, however, clear, cold sunlight, and the wet canvas swayed
across a patch of blue, while the lads could see the froth of the
rollers shine incandescent against the flashing green over the
weather-rail. The _Aldebaran_ was shouldering her way through them with
heavy plunges that buried her forecastle at times. Then she would swing
it up, streaming, high above the sea, and there was a general scramble
clear of the water which came splashing everywhere. The sunlight showed
that the men's faces were gaunt and worn. They had for more than a month
held out stubbornly, living for the most part on uncooked and soaked
provisions, toiling the watch through at shifting sail, and then
flinging themselves down in their drenched clothing only to be turned
out half-dazed by the sleep for which brain and body craved as the
screaming gale freshened again. Now they had, thanks to what the
steward had gleaned in the cabin and told the cook, reason to believe
that if the _Aldebaran_ could make a few more leagues to windward the
next day would see them round Cape Horn.
Still, they had been almost as near before only to be driven back to the
east again, and haggard faces were turned expectantly towards the hard
blueness athwart which the seatops heaved over the weather-rail.
Presently Appleby glanced up sharply as the shadow of a sail fell upon
him.
"Hallo!" he said, and there was a curious eagerness in his voice. "The
topsail leach has come between us and the sun."
"I don't see why that should please you," said Niven. "It only makes it
colder, and it's bad enough already, especially when you've had nothing
worth mentioning to eat for weeks."
"No?" said Appleby. "Well, if I'm right it means warm weather, dry
clothes, sound sleep when your watch is done, and the galley fire lit
all day."
Niven looked up. "Oh," he said with a little gasp. "The wind is backing
round--or is he only screwing her up a little?"
Both of them glanced from the straining canvas to the figure at the
wheel, and the eyes of all on deck were turned in the same direction,
for it was evident that only two things could have happened. Either the
helmsman was jamming the ship half-a-point closer to the wind, which was
unlikely, because the mate would have seen he sailed her as close as
possible before; or the wind was going round. As they watched, the
canvas swung further athwart the sun, and their hearts throbbed faster
because they knew it was the latter. In place of thrashing to windward
tack and tack, and frequently losing on one all they had made upon the
other, they were now sailing almost in the direction they desired to go.
"I wish I could see the compass," said Niven. "Still, the wind must be
backing southerly by the bearing of the sun. Why doesn't the old man
let her go while he can?"
It is probable that every man on deck was asking the same question, for
the heads of all were turned towards the poop, and nothing would have
induced one of them to speak when the skipper appeared out of the
companion. He stood quite still for several minutes, and then nodded to
the officer of the watch as though contented, but no one moved on deck
when he went below, and the attitude of the men suggested what they
felt. They were, it seemed, not round Cape Horn yet, and the
_Aldebaran_ still held on plunging through the white-topped rollers
close-hauled. Hour after hour dragged by, and all on board bore them in
tense expectancy, until at last, when the watch was changed again, the
skipper came forward to the edge of the poop with a little sour smile on
his face. He spoke ostensibly to the mate close by him, but it is
possible he meant his voice to carry further.
"Get a pull on the weather-braces, and the topgallants loosed. We'll
make a fair wind of it," he said.
The mate came forward shouting, and for once he was very willingly
obeyed. Both watches were on deck, for the one relieved had not left it
yet, and the men fell over each other in their eagerness to get at the
ropes, while Appleby felt his pulses throbbing and the blood surge to
his face, as he watched the figure aft pulling at the wheel.
Round went the long, slanting yards, stopped, swung further, and stopped
again, while the _Aldebaran_ hove herself more upright and shook the
salt wash from her as she brought the wind upon her quarter. Then there
was a scurrying of agile figures, stripped of their oilskins now, for
the high top-gallant yards, and when the loose canvas blew away from
them, wet and weary men broke into a breathless song as they swung and
fell about the feet of the masts. They had hoarse voices, and the lips
of some were rent and cracked. Their bodies were raw from the constant
lash of brine, but there was a light in their gaunt faces and the ring
of triumph in their song. Its words were senseless rubbish, but through
them the spirit of those who sang was clear, and it was the pride that
comes of a hardly-won victory. They had borne almost all that flesh and
blood could bear, and now they had won the gale they had defied and
beaten was their ally. The _Aldebaran_ seemed to know it, and swept
north-west faster at every roll, hurling off vast folds of froth from
her hove-up bows, while the foam seethed and flashed past, lapping in
places almost to her rail. Still, for a ship will carry more canvas
going free than she will close-hauled, her crew were not contented, and
while they coiled the ropes away still watched the motionless figure on
the poop expectantly.
Once more he raised a hand, and there was another scramble, more eager
than before, and a rush towards the weather-shrouds, while presently
great folds of canvas came dropping from the long lower yards. They
spread out in a vast curve from rail to rail, and the _Aldebaran_,
quivering to the drag of them, sped on faster than ever, with a wake
that swirled and seethed far back across the long seas that now came
rolling up behind her.
Then a Breton Frenchman solemnly danced upon the deck, and a little
Italian cackled with shrill laughter, while a half-articulate growl of
victory that was not a cheer went up from the British sailormen. They
were flying faster than any but a very fast steamer, away from cold and
wet and hunger, northwards towards the sun again.
For two days the _Aldebaran_ drove along, swept by spray, at a pace
which occasionally exceeded twelve miles an hour, and then, though her
decks dried up and the foam sank lower beneath her rail, the pace did
not diminish appreciably, for as the wind fell lighter there was a
crowding on of sail. The royals were shaken out in turn, stay-sails in
rows swelled between the masts, and while the long heave that was
smoother now and dazzlingly blue came rolling up on her beam, she swung
along, three towering spires of canvas above a froth-licked hull, with
her jibboom pointing to the midday sun. It grew warmer every day,
oilskins, pilot-coats and long boots were flung aside, wet berths and
saturated bedding dried, and there was no more dining on pulpy biscuit
because a sea had washed out the galley as well as the fire.
Then there might have been peace and contentment on board the
_Aldebaran_ had not the mate's temper apparently grown worse as the
weather grew finer, until the half-cowed, sullen crew were glad to crawl
away below out of the reach of his beady eyes when the watch was done.
They were kept hard at work at something all day long, chipping iron,
painting, scraping spars down, and the man who had only a bitter jibe
for the most willing and scurrilous abuse for the tired generally
contrived when nothing more unpleasant suggested itself that Niven or
Appleby should carry the tar pot, while the blood would surge to their
faces at the words which followed, if at any time they let fall one
splash of it where it was not wanted.
The work began as soon as there was light enough to see by, and was
never done. A good deal of it was brutal and much unnecessary, and it
went on without intermission under the scorching sun of the equator, and
was apparently no nearer finished when reaching in close-hauled one day
they had their first glimpse of the great, snow-crested mountains that
rise above the forests of Washington. Then the apprentices envied the
men who had only signed on to Vancouver, because they at least would
soon be free of the ceaseless small-persecution and hateful tyranny.
At last as they worked into the Straits of San Juan the pines of
Vancouver Island lifted themselves above the horizon, and a day or two
later the _Aldebaran_ came to an anchor off Port Parry, which is where
the warships lie and close to Victoria City. Vancouver, where she was
to unload, stands on the Canadian coast about a day's sail with a fair
wind further east, but the straits are sprinkled with islands and swept
by tides, and because the wind was easterly and the sky dimmed by smoke,
the skipper had gone ashore that morning to send off telegrams and if
possible engage a tug. He did not return all day, and when evening was
closing in Appleby and Niven sat outside the deckhouse, while the mate
stood up on the poop apparently to see if there was any signal from the
shore.
The evening was chilly, and a fresh breeze streaked the waters with a
haze of smoke from some great forest fire which drove in thin wisps
across the rising moon and now and then growing thicker blotted out the
dark pines ashore. The lads had been working hard helping to send down
the lighter canvas all day, and now they were aching in every limb.
They were also moody, for do what they would the mate's bitter tongue
had not spared them. Somebody was singing forward in the forecastle,
and now and then a burst of hoarse laughter came aft, for the men there
would be leaving the _Aldebaran_ in a day or two. Niven sighed a little
as he listened.
"Those fellows are well off. It's no wonder they're singing," he said.
"Things are getting worse every day, and I'm very sick of it, Tom."
Appleby laughed, but there was not much merriment in his face. "Of the
sea?"
"Well," said Niven slowly, "the sea is different from what I expected it
would be, but that's not what I mean."
"The mate then?"
Niven nodded. "Of course," he said. "Now, he stops with the ship, and
we don't know where we're going to from Vancouver. Lawson was telling
me the Company's ships are away sometimes four years together. Four
years of that mate, Tom. Just fancy it!"
Appleby's face grew a trifle grim. It was not an encouraging prospect,
and he could see no way of avoiding it.
"It does not sound nice," he said.
"No," said Niven savagely. "If there's no improvement--and I don't
expect there will be--I'm not going to put up with it." Then he glanced
at his companion. "Tom, you'll stand in with me?"
Appleby looked grave. "Don't be an ass, Chriss. Wait and see what can
be done when you go home."
Niven sat silent for almost a minute, and when he spoke his young face
was very determined. "The point is, when are we going home? If we sail
from here for England I'll try to put up with him, but if there's to be
two or three more years of it I'm going to make for the bush before she
leaves Vancouver. There's no use talking. I'm quite decided, and the
only question is whether you will come with me!"
Appleby, glancing at his comrade, saw that no arguments could persuade
him. Niven could be very obstinate, and Appleby had reasons for
believing that the other apprentices also intended slipping away.
"If you go I'll go too, but I don't want to," he said quietly. "You
see, there are good mates as well as brutes like this one, while I may
never get another chance if I throw away the one your father has given
me. I don't like the _Aldebaran_, but I still like the sea."
"The pater would find you a dozen better ones," said Niven eagerly, but
Appleby shook his head.
"I couldn't take another favour from him if I made a bad use of this
one."
Niven rose and moved once or twice wearily across the deck. "I'd get
him to make you. Then you're not coming?"
"Yes," said Appleby gravely. "Whatever you decide on I shall do, but
that will separate us very soon, because I will not ask your father to
find me another opportunity."
Niven stopped and stood still with indecision in his face, while his
voice was a trifle hoarse as he said, "Tom, you're a good fellow, and
ever since I knew you have done your best for me, but now--oh, it's just
because you're so decent you're stopping me putting an end to this
misery."
"I'm not sorry," said Appleby dryly. "If you go, I'm coming too. Only
when your father sends for you I shall stay out here and do anything I
can or go on board another ship as seaman."
Niven saw he was beaten, and sat down wearily. "Very well!" he said with
a little groan. "Perhaps something will happen, and I don't care what
it is. Anything would be better than--this--and I simply can't bear it
very much longer. Now the Dutchman's coming round the mate will be more
brutal than ever."
He said nothing further, and while he sat still with a hopeless face in
black dejection, the mate, who did not know all that he was doing, took
his affairs in hand. Coming forward along the deck he stopped before
them with a packet in his hand.
"Take the gig ashore, and put these letters in the post," he said.
"Wait for half-an-hour, and then if you see no sign of the skipper, come
off again. You can take Cally with you."
The lads were almost desperate, or they would not have done a foolish
thing, for Appleby did not stand up.
"It's not our watch, sir," he said.
The mate swung round and looked at him with a little glint in his eyes.
"You're talking again," he said. "If you're not on board the gig inside
five minutes, I'll have my answer ready for you."
Appleby rose up and touched his cap sardonically, but Niven was sullen.
"Very well, sir, but the gig's too big for us, and I don't know that we
can pull her back against the breeze," he said.
The mate moved a little nearer with an unpleasant smile in his face.
"The stream will sweep you off the land unless you do, and it should
help you to pull if you remember it," he said. "That reminds me, I want
Cally for something else."
Appleby saw that he had made a mistake again. Since he had spoken to the
skipper their persecutor had avoided violence and harassed them with a
vindictive cunning which left no room for any objection that would not
put them in the wrong. So far speech had only lost them the help of a
third hand who could have taken his turn at an oar and steered for them,
and he grasped Niven fiercely by the shoulder lest he should answer as
he turned away. The gig lay astern, and in another minute or two they
had climbed down into her, and casting off stepped the mast and ran up
the little sail. The wind would carry them ashore, but the gig though
light was nearly twenty feet long, and, while they could row tolerably
well, both knew it would cost them a strenuous effort to pull her off
again.
"He's a pig and a beast!" said Niven, hoarse with rage, as he sat aft
with the tiller in his hand while the boat swung over the little
splashing sea. "She's not going to fetch the ship under sail coming
back, and it will be no end of a fag to pull her, while I'm about done
with handling those staysails all day already."
Appleby said nothing, but his face was very sombre as he slacked the
sheet a little when a puff of spray flew over the weather gunwale, and
the brine lapped perilously near the opposite one. He saw that the
breeze was freshening, as an easterly wind often does at nightfall, and
did not anticipate any pleasure in rowing back again.
*CHAPTER VII*
*ADRIFT*
When Appleby and Niven came clattering down the beach it was growing
very cold and night was closing in. They had not found the skipper, and
a man had told them that the little tramway between Port Parry and
Victoria had stopped running. The lads had also been working hard in
the sunshine all day, and because the mate had given them no time to
change the light clothes they stood in they shivered a little in the
chilly breeze. It came down moaning across the dark pines, crisping the
land-locked harbour where two big warships lay, and when they stood on
the pebbles there was a clear ringing of bugles.
"Half-an-hour, to the minute," said Appleby. "There's a tolerably stiff
breeze."
"You timed us?" said Niven. "Of course, you would. Now, I could never
have remembered it."
Appleby laughed a trifle grimly. "Yes," he said. "You see, I didn't
want to stay here any longer than was necessary with the wind
freshening. It's going to be quite hard enough work to get back as it
is."
Niven groaned a little as he helped to thrust off the boat, for he was
very tired, and his limbs had stiffened with the cold, while as he was
about to step on board a Canadian came sauntering down the beach.
"Are you two lads going off to the barque out there?" he asked.
[Illustration: "'ARE YOU TWO LADS GOING OFF TO THE BARQUE OUT THERE?'"]
Appleby nodded, and the man glanced towards the swaying trees and the
little streaks of froth that showed white against the dimness out at
sea. "It's a tolerably big contract," he said reflectively. "You've
got to go?"
"Yes," said Appleby. "If you knew what our mate was like you wouldn't
ask that question."
The Canadian laughed. "I figure I can guess," he said. "Well, now, you
pull up well to windward along the shore where you'll get less breeze
and smoother water, and when it strikes you you're far enough to head
her across pull fit to split your boots--but don't miss her."
Appleby saw it was good advice, and did his best to follow it, but his
back was aching and his arms were stiff; while when Niven missed a
stroke, which he did not infrequently, the wind drove them a trifle
further off shore before they could pull the gig's head round again.
She had been built for four men to row, and while they would have no
difficulty in propelling her in smooth water it was different when with
the wind against them every little lurch checked her speed. Still, they
toiled for half-an-hour or so, making no great progress that Appleby who
watched the trees ashore could see, until Niven groaned.
"I'm almost done," he said. "If you don't head across soon I'll double
up before we fetch the _Aldebaran_."
Appleby glanced at the shore, and then at the barque's riding light
blinking fitfully half-a-mile away.
It was no great distance, but the breeze that blew slantwise off the
shore would be on their side while they headed for her, and if the boat
made much leeway they could not reach her. Nor did he fancy they would
have the strength to drive the gig back to windward if they once drifted
astern of her.
"Shake yourself together, Chriss, and we'll make a shot at it," he said.
Niven said nothing, but he bent his back, and for ten minutes they
strained every sinew while the boat lurched and plunged on the little
splashing sea as they drew out from the land. Cold as it was the
perspiration dripped from them, and the oars slipped in their greasy
palms, while both were gasping when a haze of smoke that blotted out
everything drove down upon them.
"Head her up a little," said Appleby when the blinking light faded.
"Put all you're good for into it, and row. There's nothing but the
Pacific before us if we miss the _Aldebaran_."
For another five minutes Niven rowed desperately, his heart thumping and
his breath coming in half-stifled gasps, while the boat plunged more
viciously with the sea upon her bow. Then he missed his stroke as the
moon came through, and Appleby could not check a little groan of dismay.
They were close to the _Aldebaran_ and could see her plainly as a cold
blast drove the haze away, but she was well up on their weather instead
of under their lee, and he knew it was beyond the power of any two
worn-out lads to reach her against the wind.
"It's no use," said Niven hoarsely. "I can't do any more. Shout if you
can, though we'd be out of sight before they could get the other boat
over."
They made the most noise they could, but it is difficult to shout when
exhausted by a strenuous effort, and it is more than possible that the
splash of the sea and sighing of the wind drowned their strained voices.
Nor is the low dusky shape of a boat easy to discern from a ship's deck
on a hazy night. In any case, there was no answer, and for a minute the
lads watched the three tall spars and strip of hull that rose black
against the moon slide away from them--and that was the last they ever
saw of the _Aldebaran_. Then another gust brought down the haze again,
and while the smoky greyness drifted past them they were alone.
"I can scarcely pull," said Niven. "Do you think we could fetch
ashore?"
"I don't," said Appleby with grim directness. "Still, we can try, and
it's the only thing we can do."
They rowed for about twenty minutes, the splashing strokes growing
slower while the plunging grew sharper, and then stopped again as the
haze thinned a little. The blink of the barque's riding light was no
longer perceptible, nor could they see anything of the shore.
"Well?" said Niven dejectedly.
Appleby laughed, though his voice was not mirthful and there was a
curious tremor in it. "You wanted to leave the _Aldebaran_--and I fancy
you've got your wish," he said. "We're blowing out from land, and
there's quite a sea getting up."
"Yes," groaned Niven. "That's plain enough. What are we going to do?"
"I don't know," said Appleby. "It's not blowing much, and the proper
thing would be to keep her lying head to with the oars until the
morning. Then we'd see the land. If we kept pulling easy she wouldn't
drift very much. The difficulty is that we're not fit to do it."
"No," said Niven decisively. "No more rowing for me. That's not going
to work, anyway. What's the next best thing?"
"Make a sea anchor with the mast and sail and a piece of iron hanging
from it, and lie to it with a long cable," said Appleby who had been
reading some of Lawson's books.
"Rot again!" said Niven. "We haven't got any iron, and the few yards of
rope forward wouldn't be half enough."
"Then," said Appleby with a little hollow laugh, "we can only let her
drift, unless the sea gets too big for it. I don't feel like rowing any
more myself."
They threw the oars in, and sat down out of the wind on the floorings,
feeling very lonely, for an hour or so. The gig was long and narrow with
only a few inches of her bottom in the water, and the wind did what it
would with her. Now it drove her sideways, now it whirled her round,
and all the while the dark slopes of water rose higher and the night
grew colder. At last when a little splash of brine fell on Appleby's
face he rose to his knees and saw a yellow flicker with a green blink
beneath it swinging towards them through the haze.
"Get your oar out--quick! There's a steamer coming up," he said.
Niven obeyed him, but it was another thing to pull the oar. Their tired
arms had stiffened, and it is somewhat difficult to row in tumbling
water. The wind would also blow the gig's head round in spite of them,
and little frothy splashes came in over the bow, but the lights were
growing brighter, and when at last they stopped rowing a big, shadowy
bow was forging through the water close in front of them.
Twice they sent up a breathless shout, while the bow drew out into a
length of dusky hull. They could see the double row of deckhouses
showing dimly white, and the big, black funnel high above them, but only
the thumping of engines answered their cry, and in another moment the
boat reeled and plunged as the steamer's stern went by. Then a little
seething rush of foam lapped in over the gunwale, and Niven groaned.
"The brutes--they could have heard us if they had wanted to," he said
with hoarse unevenness, and Appleby saw what was going to happen by the
way his comrade flung in his oar.
"Hold up!" he said sternly. "Shake it off, and stiffen your back,
Chriss. If you're going to give up we can't do anything."
"It can't make any difference," said Niven with hopeless apathy. "You
know as well as I do that we can do nothing now."
It was not astonishing that his courage should desert him. He was worn
out, and already the gig was taking more than splashes in over her
gunwale, for they had blown well out from land and the freshening breeze
had raised a little frothing sea in the more open water. It appeared
very possible that the craft would roll over presently. Appleby,
however, though very near it, was not quite beaten yet.
"That's where you're wrong," said he. "We can get a little sail on her
and keep her running. There's not sea enough to hurt her when she's
going before it, and we're tolerably sure to pick up a ship or see the
land to-morrow."
It was a relief to have something to do, and Niven felt a very little
easier in mind when they had stepped the mast, half-hoisted the sail and
baled the boat dry. She ran well as long, flat-floored boats do, and,
though there was usually a sea that looked unpleasantly big following
close behind her, no more water came on board. Niven lay on the
floorings by his comrade's feet where the stern kept the wind and spray
off him, and Appleby sat at the tiller doing his best to keep the boat
before the sea, and watching the froth swirl past her. It raced forward
faster than they were travelling, rose above the gunwale on either hand,
and then surged on into the darkness and was lost again. He had only
this and the chill of the wind that swept over his shoulder to guide
him, and by and by, when the gig swerved a little, in place of seething
past, the foam lapped into her. Then Niven would stir himself and bale
to free the boat of the water before more came on board her. He had,
however, no great difficulty in doing it, because a buoyant craft of
that kind will, so long as one can keep her straight, run before a
tolerably nasty sea without shipping much water, but both lads knew they
were driving four or five miles further from the land every hour.
They saw no more steamers, and very little of anything beyond the
streaks of froth that went hissing by. Sometimes for a few minutes the
moon shone through, but the silvery radiance was promptly blotted out by
the haze again, and Appleby grew steadily colder and stiffer at the
tiller. He was also getting drowsy, though he knew that if he relaxed
his vigilance for a moment and let the gig swerve as she lurched forward
with a sea the next would fill her to the gunwales or roll her over. At
last when his head would droop a little in spite of his efforts, Niven,
who was looking aft just then, rose half-upright.
"Hallo!" he said excitedly. "There's something coming up astern."
Appleby, with every nerve quivering, glanced over his shoulder, which
was not wise of him, and saw a tall, dusky shape rush out of the
darkness. Then the boat shot up to windward a little, and her weather
gunwale was lost in a rush of foam.
"Bale!" he shouted, as he felt the chilly water splash about his ankles.
Niven grasped the baler, for there was evidently no time to lose, but as
he did so a banging and rattling came out of the darkness, and a hoarse
cry reached them.
"Down sail, and pull her up to us!"
Appleby let the sheet fly, and scrambled forward, and in another moment
the flapping sail fell into the boat.
Then while the gig lurched perilously and they struggled to get the oars
out a shadowy blur of thrashing canvas swept past them and stopped close
ahead. After that he only remembered rowing savagely until a low dark
hull that plunged and rolled swayed down upon the boat and smote her
heavily. A man sprang down apparently with a rope, another leaning over
the bulwarks clutched Niven and dragged him up, and Appleby, who did not
quite know how he got there, found himself standing on a little
schooner's deck. Somebody was speaking close beside him.
"She's twenty feet, anyway, and there's nowhere we could stow her."
"Then you can let her go," said another man. "Box her round with the
staysail, Donegal. She'll fall off now. Let draw, and out with the
main-boom again!"
There was no sharpness in the man's voice, and he spoke with a drawl,
but Appleby had never seen sail handled as quickly on board the
_Aldebaran_. Here and there a dark object hauled on a rope, and then
with a swing to leeward and a swift upward lurch the schooner was on her
way again. He did not fancy the vessel was a trader, because she seemed
too fast and small for that, and while he wondered what her business
might be the man who had spoken touched him.
"Come right along, and we'll have a look at you," he said.
Appleby and Niven followed him into the little house under the mainboom,
the floor of which was below the level of the deck, and stood still with
the water trickling from them while a lamp swung above them. A little
stove burned in one corner, the place seemed very hot, while a curious
odour pervaded it. Then Appleby's eyes rested on the man who sat down
at one end of the little swing table. He was tall and lanky, and his
face was lean, while his skin was the colour of new leather, and a
ponderous hand rested on the table in front of him. His hair was
slightly grizzled, and there was something that suggested resolution in
the set of his lips and the shape of his chin. There was, however, a
little smile in his eyes, which were very keen.
"Sit you down," he said. "Kind of cold night for a picnic, and you were
making good time for Yokohama when we saw you first."
The lads obeyed him, and the man thumped upon the beam above him when
Niven sank huddled into a corner and closed his eyes. Then there was a
cold draught as a skylight opened and a man looked in. "Wanting
anything?" he said.
"Tell Brulee to worry round and raise a pint or two of coffee--hot,"
said the man at the table, who glanced at Appleby. "Your partner's
played out, but we'll fix him in a minute."
"Are you the skipper of this schooner, sir?" asked Appleby.
The man nodded. "That's just what I am--Ned Jordan of Vancouver,
British Columbia, though I kind of figure it's me that's conducting this
meeting. It was about the picnic you were going to tell me."
Appleby felt reassured, for the man's voice was good-humoured, though he
fancied it would not be advisable to trifle with him.
"There wasn't any picnic, sir," he said. "We didn't come out for
pleasure."
"No," said Jordan dryly. "I didn't figure there was. Those things
you've got on don't look quite like a city lad's outfit. Still, I was
wondering if you were going to put it that way."
Appleby flushed a trifle, for he guessed the man's thoughts. "What do
you fancy we are?" said he.
Jordan smiled dryly. "It's me that's asking the questions, but I'm
quite open to tell you. You're two English lads from the big barque off
Port Parry, and I figure you got tired of her."
"We didn't run away from her," said Appleby.
"Well," said Jordan with a trace of grimness, "whether you did or didn't
don't count for much with me, but I've no use for crooked talking on
board this packet. Better tell me what started you off for Japan, and
put it as straight as you can."
Appleby told his story, and Jordan glanced at Niven, who had opened his
eyes again. "You would tell it the same way, too?"
"Of course," said Niven angrily. "Still, I'm not going to do it since
you don't believe him."
There was a little gleam in Jordan's eyes, and, as he looked at them in
turn, they found his gaze somewhat embarrassing. "Still, you're not
worrying because you can't get back?" he said.
"No," said Appleby. "I'm uncommonly glad I can't."
Jordan nodded. "Not much to eat, and plenty kicks?" he said, as a man
came in. "Well, here's the coffee, and I figure you could worry through
a little grub as well. Whatever they fed you with on board the barque,
they didn't make you fat."
He laid a fresh loaf, butter, and a can of meat upon the table, and the
lads did not wait for a second invitation, while it was a good many
minutes later when Appleby laid his knife down with a little sigh of
content.
"We have got to thank you, sir, but it's time we asked where the
schooner's going to, and when you can put us ashore?" he said.
Jordan nodded, and pointed to the northern half of the compass fixed in
the skylight above him. "That's where she's going--up there into the
ice and fog where the fur seals live," he said. "As to the other
question, we could land you in Vancouver when the season's over. We're
away five or six months as the usual thing."
"But that would never do for us," said Niven with dismay.
"No?" said Jordan dryly. "Well, you see, I wasn't thinking of you very
much. I didn't ask you to come here, and there are a few other men as
well as myself I've got to suit on board this packet."
Appleby stared at him in silence for a space. "But you can't take us
away north unless we are willing to go," said he. "You could haul her
on a wind, and put us ashore on the west coast of Vancouver Island
to-morrow. My friend's father would pay you well for doing it."
Again the expression Appleby had noticed crept into Jordan's eyes.
"Well," he said with a little laugh, "I figure I can, and if I put you
ashore on the beach you'd starve in the bush. Now, I don't quite like
the way you're talking, because while there's no kicking on board the
_Champlain_, we've no use for more than one skipper--and that's me.
When you've got that into your head we'll go on a little. Says you,
'The other lad's father will pay you.' Well, I don't know him, and he's
living six thousand miles away, while if he'd sense enough to raise
dollars he could heave away, he'd never have sent his son to sea.
That's quite plain to me."
"My father is a rich merchant, and a clever one," said Niven
indignantly. "The value of a good many schooners like this one wouldn't
be much to him."
"Then," said Jordan with a grim smile, "it's quite clear you don't take
after him. Folks of that kind know when talking's not much use to them,
but it's time we got ahead a little. We were nigh a month behind when
we started from Vancouver, and with five boats way up before me, I'm not
stopping one hour for anybody, and the _Champlain_ is going north like a
steamer while this breeze lasts. You've heard all I've got to tell you
as to that. Now it might be two or three months before I could put you
on board anything coming south, and in the meanwhile I've got to give
you clothes and feed you, while, as I want all the dollars I've got, to
do it for nothing wouldn't be square to me. So since you came on board
the _Champlain_, I'm wanting your word that you'll stay there until we
get back to Vancouver. You'll get half a man's share in what we make, if
we find you useful and willing, and that seems to me a square offer."
Appleby looked at Niven. "It can't be helped--and we couldn't be worse
off than we were in the _Aldebaran_," he said. "There's no use in
telling him any more about your father."
Niven sat silent a little, and then nodded. "We'll come, sir," he said.
"Then," said Jordan, "it's a deal. Now those things of yours aren't
quite fit to go sealing in, and you can take these along. Stickine will
show you how to fix them up to-morrow."
He took out several curiously smelling garments from a cupboard, and
shouted, "Stickine!" and in another minute the lads went out on deck and
down a hatchway with a big silent man who grinned at them reassuringly.
*CHAPTER VIII*
*THE 'CHAMPLAIN,' SEALER*
A streak of sunlight that crept warm across his face and then swung away
again awakened Appleby next morning, and for a moment or two he lay
still staring about him in dreamy wonder. The _Aldebaran's_ deckhouse
was held together by little iron beams, and in place of these great
square timbers and ponderous knees ran into the vessel's framing above
his head. There was something curiously unfamiliar about them. Then he
saw that a long shelf, divided into wooden bunks, extended beyond the
one he lay in, and there were more of them on the opposite side of the
vessel. Between lay a space of shadow save where a shaft of sunlight
came down through an opening, and Appleby remembered suddenly when as he
watched it swing to and fro he felt a quick rise and fall which was very
different from the long upward lurch of the _Aldebaran_. Reaching over
he laid his hand on Niven's shoulder.
"Turn out! It's eight bells, and they're tacking ship," he said.
Niven was out of his bunk in a moment, and a burst of hoarse laughter
greeted him, when he stood swaying, half-awake, on the deck, in the
scantiest of attire, with dismay in his face.
"What's--what's all this?" he said. "Wherever have I got to?"
"Well," said the man called Stickine they had seen in the cabin, "I
guess it isn't the _Aldebaran_. Now, hadn't you better get some of
those things on to you?"
Niven struggled into the garments the man pointed to, while Appleby sat
on the edge of his bunk and grinned at him, and a group of men sitting
in the shadow with plates upon their knees watched them both curiously.
There were five or six of them, and all had bronzed faces that had been
darkened by frost and ice blink, as well as sun and wind, and there was,
he fancied, a difference between these men and any he had seen on board
the _Aldebaran_. He came to know them later--as a few gentlemen who
watched affairs of State in Vladivostock, Washington, and Ottawa did--as
very daring seamen and fearless free lances, who now and then came home
rich with fur seal pelts from the misty seas, in spite of the edicts and
gunboats of three great nations. In the meanwhile he saw they were
getting a much better breakfast than that usually sent forward on board
the _Aldebaran_, and there was an air of good-humoured comradeship about
them. Appleby had by this time got into his trousers, and one of the
group stood up when he dropped to the deck.
"Clear away for firing practice with the turret gun!" he said.
Niven stared at him a moment, and then guessing what was meant laughed a
little. "No," he said "you've missed it this time."
"Be easy while I try him," said another man, and then slammed his hand
down on the table. "Eyes front. 'Tinshun company!"
"Wrong again!" said Appleby who, remembering the warships at Port Parry,
surmised that they were taken for lads who had quitted their nation's
service without permission.
"Sure, an' how was I to know, when the woods is thick with them!" said
the seaman glancing round at his comrades deprecatingly. "Then 'tis
watch your topsail leaches and mainsail haul, again."
"Yes," said Appleby, grinning, "now you've got it. If you'd had any
sense you'd have seen we were too thin for navy lads, and too young for
the marines."
There was a chuckle, and the man, who had twinkling blue eyes, stretched
out an inviting arm. "Then come along, darling, and ate," he said.
They sat down on a chest, and one of the company gave each of them a can
of very good coffee, and pointing to the great piece of fish in a
frying-pan tossed a loaf in their direction.
"Ned Jordan will see you earn it, so you needn't be afraid," he said.
Appleby helped himself, and Niven laughed when he saw that the men were
watching him admiringly. "They feed you well out here," he said. "We
didn't get soft bread and halibut for breakfast on board the
_Aldebaran_."
"This," said a grinning man, "is a great country. Now I'm going to raise
you, Donegal. The lad's with me."
The man he spoke to turned with a sparkle in his eyes, and the sun that
shone down the hatch glinting on his coppery hair.
"This," he said, "is not a country--'tis the sea, an' the place ye come
from is made up of the leavings of the old one. 'Tis the dumping-ground
for all them we've no use for yonder--bankrupts, suicides and
green-and-red-blind sailors. When a gintleman in my country is too big
a nuisance to his neighbours, the boys sind the hat round and prisint
him wid a ticket for Canadaw."
He brought out the last word with the accentuation of the French
Canadian; but the big, lean sailorman only grinned at him. "An'," he
said, "fwhat was ut brought you here thin, Donegal?"
Donegal laughed softly. "A hare," said he. "She would come an' sit on
the turf-wall winking--impudent at me, an' with one of the guns that was
out in '98 in the cabin, what would anny man of intilligince do? She was
a good gun if ye gave her time and had something sthrong to lean her on,
but the magistrate--an' me owing him tin pound rint--did not agree with
me. There was no Ground Game Act thin, an' ye tuck the chances when ye
went shooting in my counthry. Would ye be finding the lads another
loaf--one is no use to them--Brulee, and now Mainsail Haul, was it the
mate or the skipper who did not agree with ye?"
Appleby realized that speech was direct here and he must hold his own.
"I fancy you all know how I came here, by this time, as well as I do,"
he said, glancing towards Stickine. "That man was about the cabin when
I told my story--and they bring you a joint when you're through with
your second course in the old country."
"Hear him!" said Donegal. "Sure now, for a sailorman, 'tis Stickine
that romances tremenjous, an' he told us the other one was an earl's son
from the old country. 'Turn the _Champlain_ round and put me ashore--at
once. What's the value of ten schooners to the father av me?' says he."
Niven looked somewhat foolish, but Appleby laughed. "Well, there was an
Emperor's relative who went to sea in a merchant ship not very long
ago," he said.
Donegal shook his head solemnly. "The man was mad. All thim royal
families but our one is," he said.
"In the meanwhile I'd like to know a little more about where we're going
and what we're going to do, now I'm one of you," said Niven. "You see,
I couldn't ask the skipper too many questions."
"'Tis his condescending modesty," said Donegal. "'One of you,' says he!
Sure, 'tis ten years it would take to make a man of ye, an' it takes ten
more to make a man into a sealer. Stickine, will ye enlighten the son
av the ducal earl?"
Niven fidgeted, for he realized that education is not everything, and
that even in speech he had not shown himself the seaman's equal; but
Stickine tapped on the table. "It works out like this," he said; "we're
going to hear the bear growl, and the eagle scream, and if it's a
white-flag gunboat, put a pinch of salt right on the beaver's tail."
"Russia," said Niven, "and America, the beaver's Canada, but what have
the gunboats to do with the seals?"
"Sure," said Donegal, "'tis plain they did not teach ye very much at
school. Now, the seal, ye will observe, lives most of his time where no
man can get at him in the lonely sea, but wanst in the year he crawls
out on the rocks of St. Paul and St. George, up in the Behring Sea, and
when it is not convenient for ye to find him there ye may call at one or
two reefs in Russian water or the Copper Islands."
"Well," said Niven, "where do the warships come in?"
"'Tis patient as well as modest ye are," said the sealer. "Now, 'tis
not discreet of a youngster to hurry a grown man, an' that they would
have taught ye wid the thick end of a gun whin ye were in the marines!"
"I was never in the marines," said Niven a trifle hotly, and Donegal
sighed.
"Sure," he said, "'tis a pity, but I will prolong the discussion. Now,
by the laws of the three nations ye may kill the seals at sea, though
they will not help ye to find them, that being left--with other
things--to the sealerman's devices, an' the sea, ye will remember, is
not the sea until it's more than three miles from land."
"That's a little mixed," said Appleby, glancing at the rest of the
company.
"No," said Donegal. "'Tis reason. When you are inside the three miles
you are in Russia, America, or Canada, because that's just how far a big
gun could blow the head off ye."
"There was once an American who figured it was ten," said Stickine
dryly.
"Fighting Bob!" said somebody, and there was a hoarse guffaw, during
which Donegal said quietly, "An' the lashings of dollars it cost him."
"Now, 'tis strictly prohibited to any one but the American company that
rints them Pribyloff islands to kill the seals on land, an' if ye come
too close on others I could tell of the Russians are not kind to ye.
There was wanst a fifty-year-old schooner came home manned by starving
men, an' they'd ate the last tail of the rats aboard her. 'Twas that or
Siberia with them, but Stickine will tell ye the tale again."
"Then where do you catch the seals?" asked Appleby.
There was a little quiet laughter, and Donegal shook his head. "Asleep
anywhere eight and ten miles out at sea, as 'tis entered in the
logbook," he said. "Still, ye may discover that under circumstances
unconthrollable the sealerman kills the holluschackie--where he can."
Appleby, glancing at the men's bronzed faces, fancied that their
merriment was a trifle grim, but a voice came down through the hatch
just then--
"If you are quite through with your talking you might come up and get
more sail on her."
They went up in a body, for though Appleby had noticed already that
discipline was not especially evident on board the _Champlain_ he was
also to discover that nobody loitered when there was work on hand. The
lads followed, and the first thing that occurred to them was that the
schooner was ridiculously small. After the great length and height of
the _Aldebaran_ she seemed a toy ship with two dainty little masts.
Still, Appleby saw that they were tall for her length and made of the
beautiful figured redwood which affords the maximum of strength. Her
bowsprit was tilted high to lift the men who crawled out on it above the
icy seas, and the great boom along her mainsail's foot ran out at least
a fathom beyond her stern. Then he began to notice her slenderness
forward in spite of the breadth of the beam that gave her stability to
carry a press of sail, and the lift of the deck towards the bows which
the rail carried higher in a bold curve that would keep her dry when she
thrashed to windward. Between the masts stood a nest of boats packed
one inside the other with their thwarts lifted out, and Niven wondered
what so small a vessel did with so many. It was evident she did not
carry them as a precaution, for he could see that everything about her
suggested strength and safety.
About the boats stood a few Siwash Indians, squat, broad-shouldered men
dressed in jean and canvas, and looking, except for their brown colour,
very much like the rest of the crew. They were, it seemed, by no means
savages, but again Appleby wondered, for they were doing nothing, and
the _Champlain_ carried almost men enough to work an English merchant
ship. Aft with half his lean height showing above the deckhouse skipper
Jordan stood swaying at the wheel, and he swung one hand up when he saw
the lads.
"Feeling quite pert this morning?" he said when they came aft. "Well,
you can go up and loose the fore-topsail."
Though this was not the kind of order the lads had been used to they
went forward, and felt that the skipper's eyes were on them when they
stopped abreast of the foremast. There were no rattlings on the
_Champlain's_ shrouds, and Appleby was wondering how they were to get
aloft when Niven pointed to the hoops the big foresail was bound to
which ran like a ladder up the mast.
"I fancy those would do?" he said.
They went up, and it was an easy matter to loose the little
three-cornered topsail which stretched when set from the masthead to the
end of the gaff. Then they stood still a moment or two perched high on
the cross-trees looking down on the slender strip of hull and the
white-topped sea. The _Champlain_ was swinging over it, and the foam
that roared off from her bows and swept away down the white wake showed
the pace at which she was travelling. Niven drew in a deep breath of
contentment as he swung in a wide sweep to and fro, the blue of the sky
above him and the blue and white of the sea below.
"I'm not sorry the _Aldebaran's_ at Port Parry, and we're here," he
said. "She's a beauty, and they feed you well, while I never fancied
anything twice her size could tear along like this."
"Hallo! Going to sleep up there?" said somebody, and Appleby glancing
down saw a little twinkle in the eyes of Stickine.
"Topsail's all clear for hoisting, sir," he said, and one or two of
those about the big man laughed. "What's the quickest way of getting
down, Chriss?"
Niven stooped and grasped a rope. "Topsail tack, I think. It should
do," he said.
In another second the rope was rasping between his ankles and through
his hands, then it yielded suddenly and he fell at least a fathom with
Appleby's feet just above his head. It held again, however, and he slid
to the deck, while the rest were setting the big maintopsail with a yard
along the head of it when he went aft. The skipper glanced at him a
moment, and then turned to the men.
"We'll goosewing her, boys. Get your boom foresail over," he said.
He span the wheel a trifle, the long narrow foresail lurched across, and
when it swung outboard on the opposite side the _Champlain_ lifted her
head a little and the foam that lapped higher swept almost to her
quarter-rail.
"She's flying," said Niven. "Going like a train."
Then he felt that the skipper was watching him, and wondered whether he
had done anything unfitting when he saw his little, dry smile.
"It was a straight tale you told me--most of it. Stick to that kind of
talk," he said.
Niven flushed a trifle, and was about to answer when Appleby kicked him,
and he said, "Yes, sir," instead.
Jordan nodded. "Rich men's sons don't go to sea," he said. "Well, now,
there's a thing you can remember. Never swing yourself down by anything
until you know just what it is and what it's made fast to. We've no use
for show tricks on board this packet, and I figure the cook will find
something you can do."
They went forward, Appleby grinning, Niven somewhat flushed, and it was
that night before they quite understood the skipper's meaning. The wind
had fallen and the sky was hazy when they sat talking on the forehatch.
Donegal leaned upon the rail not far from them, Stickine swung black
against the dimness at the wheel, and the _Champlain_ was sliding slowly
north, a vague moving shadow across the great emptiness. It seemed to
Appleby that he could feel the sea as he had never done on board the
_Aldebaran_. It was so close beneath him, and life and zest of it
throbbed through everything he touched. Niven, however, was looking at
the sealer.
"You were aft when the skipper spoke to us, Donegal," he said. "What
did he mean by saying he knew we'd told him the right tale?"
The man turned round and regarded him gravely. "Mr. Callaghan--an'
Donegal to my friends--an' for the son of a ducal earl there's a lot of
things you don't know," he said.
"Then," said Niven, "how am I going to learn them if I don't ask
questions?"
"Now," said Donegal dryly, "ye are showing ye have some sinse, an' if
it's searching for knowledge ye are, I will enlighten ye. The moral av
ut is that while ye speak the truth, the little things ye do don't stand
up and conthradict ye. Now, when ye knew where the topsail was that
showed ye had been to sea, but they've rattlings on the shrouds av a
square-rigger, an' it was easy to see that when ye could not find them
it perplexed ye. Then when ye were sleeping Ned Jordan had Stickine
bring some of the things ye tuk off into the cabin, an' there was names
done nice in red on wan or two of them. 'It's all quite straight but
the last ov it, an' there's lads who can't help talking big. Many's the
time I've tried to teach my own ones better--wid a fence rail,' says
he."
Donegal looked hard at Niven, but Appleby, who laughed softly, kicked
his comrade's leg.
"We'll not worry about what he told your skipper any more--but it's
true," he said.
Donegal said nothing further, but his eyes twinkled curiously, and there
was silence for a space until a blink of light crept out of the dimness
astern. The moon had risen, but was hidden by a cloud-bank in the
south-east, and there was nothing to be seen but the light that grew
steadily higher and brighter. Then a red one became visible, and while
a vague black shape grew into form there was a blink of green. Stickine
struck the deckhouse with his foot as he pulled over the wheel, and the
_Champlain_ swung round a little, but still the lights seemed to follow
her.
"A steamer," said Appleby. "What can they be after? Our canvas is
plain enough against the sky."
Donegal grunted. "A top-heavy coal basket of a gunboat, sure!" he said.
"How is it I know? Well, ye will have a better acquaintance by and by
with the ships-of-war, an' any one could see the way she's rolling if he
looked at her."
Appleby could see the higher light reeling to and fro, and a long smear
of smoke that streaked the sea below. While he watched it the dim hull
lengthened out, and he saw the white froth boil beneath the flung-up
bows. They came down amidst a spray cloud, and the slanted masts swung
wildly as the long roll of the Pacific lapped about the shadowy hull.
The steamer was close upon the _Champlain's_ quarter now.
Suddenly there was a faint twinkle of brightness on board her, and then
a great shaft of light smote a glittering track across the waters and
rested on the schooner's stern. Jordan's lean figure was forced up
against it, and Appleby could see the little dry smile in his face as he
nodded to Stickine at the wheel. He pulled it over a spoke or two, and
the _Champlain_ swerved a trifle, while Jordan's smile became a trifle
grimmer, for the light also swinging still blazed upon her stern. Then
it beat into the lad's eyes and dazzled them, swept forward and lighted
all the foresail when it rested on the boats, flickered up and down the
deck, forcing up every rope by its brilliancy, and vanished so suddenly
that Niven afterwards said he could hear it snap. Next moment the
steamer drew ahead, and the last he saw of her was her shadowy stern
lifted high on the shoulder of a long smooth sea.
Jordan laughed a little as he paced up and down beside the wheel.
"American," he said. "That fellow will know us if he falls in with us
again."
*CHAPTER IX*
*A TRIAL OF SPEED*
It was early one morning rather more than three weeks after the lads had
fallen in with the _Champlain_, and a little breeze had just sprung up
with the sun when Appleby, who was scrubbing down decks just then,
turned upon Niven who stood close by with a dripping bucket in his hand.
"I want the water here, and not all over me," he said, pointing with his
bare toes to the sand he had sprinkled on the planking.
Niven grinned, and stooping, rolled his trousers to the knee, after
which he commenced a little step-dance up and down the forehatch, and
his laugh rang lightly when a drowsy growl rose from beneath.
"You want good thick clogs to do it well, but I fancy this will bring
him up," he said. "Did yez sleep all day in the old country, Donegal?"
Now few men would have ventured to do what Niven was doing on board a
merchant ship, where the time for sleep is scanty, but as the
_Champlain_ carried twice as many men as were apparently needed, they
had ample space for rest. Still, as he swung round grimacing with his
back to the scuttle in the hatch, a coppery head rose up from it, and a
long arm reached out. Then there was a chuckle from Stickine at the
wheel, and Niven turned again just in time to receive the contents of
the bucket full in his face. After that there was a scurry across the
deck, and he swung himself up by the mast-hoops, while a rope-end
flicked about the one from which he had just whipped his naked feet, and
Donegal sat down on the hatch with a placid grin.
"Ye can stop up there and cool, me son, until Ned Jordan comes up," he
said.
Niven sat down on the jaws of the foresail gaff, and wiped his dripping
face. "Sure, 'tis an ungrateful beast, an' me just rousing him while
the morning's fresh," he said. "Tom, if I had that bucket I could drop
it nicely on his head."
Donegal gazed up at the lad reflectively. "'Tis what comes of fattening
ye too quick," he said. "There was no thricks of that kind about ye on
board the _Aldebaran_, and ye had a distressful hungry look when we got
ye."
Niven could not find a neat rejoinder, and sat still with his arm round
the throat halliards high up on the gaff, while the sun that rose with a
smoky glare out of the eastern haze shone into his face. It was bronzed
to the colour of copper, and it is possible that his friends would at
first sight have found it difficult to recognize the lad they had last
seen strutting in new uniform. He now wore jean trousers and a thick
canvas jacket which Jordan had given him, and while both were
considerably too large there were big smears of tar on them. His hands
were as hard as a navvy's, and though he had not lost the love of frolic
he had found no scope for on board the _Aldebaran_ there was a
difference in his face.
The sea had set its stamp upon Niven, and the set of his lips had grown
more resolute, while though they could still twinkle his eyes were
steadier. Hardship and the need for quick decision and self-reliance
had stiffened him, for Niven had been taught a good deal since he left
Sandycombe School, and the knowledge that even a rich merchant's son was
entitled to nothing he could not obtain by his native wit or the
strength of his hand was perhaps the most useful of it all. Money, he
had discovered, was not much use at sea, where nobody cared in the least
who he was, and it was by the things he did he must stand or fall.
There was less change in Appleby, who had been early cast upon his own
resources, but he, who had never been boisterous, was a trifle quieter,
and had already added an inch or two to the breadth of his chest. His
skin also resembled half-tanned leather, and he was picturesquely
arrayed in garments of patched canvas somewhat too large for him.
In the meanwhile Niven glancing aft, and wondering by what means he
could avoid Donegal, who appeared disposed to sit where he was all
morning, saw the crimson glare of the sunrise beat athwart the sea. It
streaked the long smooth undulations that rolled up after the
_Champlain_ a coppery red, and the schooner swung over them lazily with
half-filled mainsail banging. Under the sun there rolled a bank of
smoky vapour, and just as Jordan came up from the little deckhouse,
Niven saw something slide out of it. He was not altogether sorry, for
although there was no abuse of the men on board the _Champlain_, he
fancied the skipper's toleration had its limits, and when he looked down
Donegal flicked a rope-end suggestively.
Next moment Jordan saw him. "Now, I figured you were washing decks.
Anybody tell you to go up there?" he said.
Niven looked distinctly sheepish, and Donegal grinned. "Is ut telling
that's any use to him, an' me inviting him to come down the last
half-hour," he said. Just then the object that crept out of the haze
grew clearer, and swinging himself up by the peak halliard, Niven
stretched out an arm. "There's a schooner coming up astern, sir," he
said. "Another just showing abeam!"
Donegal sprang into the shrouds, Jordan whipped up his glasses, and
Niven, who saw they had forgotten him, slipped down. He had scarcely
reached the deck when the skipper called out, and two or three men came
scrambling out of the scuttle.
"Hand those topsails down, and get up the biggest yard-headers," he
said.
There was no scurrying, but the men were very swift, and in a few
minutes the little three-cornered topsails they had carried at night
were down, and two big ones set. The _Champlain_ quickened her pace a
trifle, but it was evident the other schooners were coming up with her.
Jordan laid down his glasses.
"The _Belle_ and the _Argo_. They're bringing the breeze along with
them," he said.
The sea was still only faintly rippled about them, and the smoke from
the galley eddied in the hollow of the foresail, but the other vessels
had grown plainer and were slanting over, while Niven, who resumed his
deck scrubbing, fancied that Jordan strode up and down impatiently.
Then Brulee, the French-Canadian cook, put his head out of the galley.
"The breakfast is quite ready, _camarades_," he said.
The lads took their places with the rest, and when they sat down Niven
glanced at the big lean-faced Stickine.
"What are we running away from those fellows for?" he said.
"Hear him!" said Donegal. "'Tis marvellous, his observation."
"Give the lad a show now and then," said the Canadian. "Well, now, when
you see Ned Jordan run away you can figure there's dollars somewhere at
the bottom of it, because if he didn't want to it would take quite a
fleet of gunboats to put a move on him."
Brulee laughed. "You others are all lak that," he said. "_V'la la
belle chose--courant en courant--la chasse de dollar_. It is so with
you also in my country, the Quebec."
"Well, now," said a little man who hailed from Montreal, "there was a
time when some of you made tolerably good running down there under
Montcalm too. I've seen the place where that chase came off, and it's
right behind the ramparts at Quebec."
"They run!" said Niven, who had read of the famous scene on the heights
of Abraham, but Donegal stretched out a big hand, and he wriggled
backwards with his plate.
"What come well from General Wolfe is a thrifle too big for the size av
ye," he said. "They were good men, both Montcalm and him, and 'tis but
the makings of one I'm after licking out of ye. Stickine, ye may
purceed."
"Well," said the Canadian, "where the fur seals go to when they haul off
from the Behring Sea nobody quite knows, but they're coming north,
thousands of them, now, and some men can figure better than others where
they'll first show up again."
"Is the skipper fortunate at finding them?" asked Appleby.
"Well, I wouldn't put it like that, just because it's tolerably plain
figuring that it wants a good big head to make a lucky man," said
Stickine. "It's the one who can do the most thinking comes out on top,
and the things Jordan knows are the ones that work out the reckoning."
"You've hit it plump," said another man. "Ned Jordan's chased the seals
that long he can tell you just what they're thinking."
Stickine nodded. "And think they can; they, and the sea otter, and the
salmon they live upon. Well, now, when Ned Jordan has worried it all
out for days, he has no use for a crowd of men who're too lazy to do
their own thinking, hanging right on to him. No, sir. When the
_Champlain_ drops right down on top of the seal herd she'll be there
alone."
They went up as soon as breakfast was over, and Niven saw that one of
the schooners had drawn close up on the _Champlain's_ quarter. The
breeze had freshened, and both vessels were hurling the froth about
their bows, and slanting over until the foam was near the rail. Foot by
foot the stranger drew up, and Niven saw the reason as he noticed the
length of her slanted masts. She sank to her bowsprit at every dip, and
the spray whirled half the height of her tall foresail, when she swung
her streaming bows up again. A man stood aft with both hands gripping
her wheel, and another with a broad grin on his face leaned on her rail.
His voice reached them faintly.
"We've been feeling lonely for the sight of you these two weeks," he
said. "Now it 'pears to me that as the _Belle_ has got the speed, we're
going to have your company."
Jordan smiled grimly as he glanced to weather. "Well, I don't know.
There's more wind coming along," he said.
Appleby was sensible of a little thrill of pleasurable excitement, for
it was evident that if Jordan desired to fall in with the seal herds
alone he must sail for it, and glancing aft at the skipper's lean figure
and quiet bronzed face he felt that he was not the man to be lightly
beaten.
At noon there was no great distance between the vessels, though the
_Belle_ with her tall masts had crept forward a little upon the
_Champlain's_ weather-quarter, and the third one lay a quarter of a mile
astern. The spray was whirling in sheets, and now and then a frothing
green deluge came in, for all three were listed well down to their
rails. The sea was also flecked and seamed with white, and it was
evident to the lads that no skipper would have driven his vessel so hard
had he not men enough to swiftly shorten sail. Then just as Brulee put
his head out of the galley, the _Champlain_ heeled further by a
screaming blast, buried her lee bow, and when she hove her head clear
again all that side of her ran water.
Jordan glanced up at his main topmast, and there was a little twinkle in
his eyes as he said, "I figure nobody would blame us for not hanging on
to our sail. Boys, we'll have the topsail down."
The big sail swung down below the mainsail gaff, but when Appleby would
have laid his hand upon the tack to haul it lower still Stickine laughed
as he stopped him. "There's two ways of winning a race," he said. "Let
her lie. 'Pears to me Ned Jordan will want her up again."
Appleby did not quite understand, but he saw Jordan's pose stiffen and
his face grow intent as the _Belle_, still carrying everything, forged
ahead. Then her topsail also fluttered, and he swung up his hand.
"Sheets in, and stand by your peak halliard to let go with a run," he
said.
Then there was a scurry along the deck, blocks groaned and rattled, and
the long booms were dragged in as the skipper put down his helm. The
schooner came round, and because no vessel will carry the sail on a wind
that she will going free, her lee-rail was in the sea and the deck
sloped like a roof. Foam and green water seethed over her weather bow,
and Appleby thrilled all through as he hung on by a pin with one hand on
the peak halliard ready to let the mainsail gaff swing down to ease the
pressure. He understood the manoeuvre now, for the _Champlain_ was
shooting up across the other schooner's stern for the berth that would
give her a free hand upon her weather. It was almost too late when the
skipper of the _Belle_ realized this, but he put his helm down pluckily,
and then the weight of his tall masts came into play. The _Belle_
seemed buried in a white confusion when she came up, too, and a huddle
of dripping figures appeared to wash aft together when she dipped her
nose in a sea. Then there was a crash as she swung her jibs out of the
foam again, and her foresail blew over to leeward banging, while the
_Champlain_ swept up dripping on her weather. A man sprang up in the
shrouds shouting ironically, but Jordan shook his head and called him
down.
"We've no use for that kind of thing here," he said.
Appleby was dripping with the spray, but his blood tingled, and his face
was flushed, while Stickine, who stood close by, nodded to him
approvingly.
"Neat, oh, yes. Quite neat!" he said. "Her foresail gaff's gone, and
we're well up on her weather where we can do what we like with her.
Still, I figure we're not going to hold on to our own sticks very long."
"Square away!" Jordan's voice rang out, and the long mainboom swung out
again, while there was by contrast a curious ease of motion when the
_Champlain_, rising more upright, turned her stern to the sea. It no
longer thrashed in over her weather bow, but ran forward white-topped on
either side of her, but the breeze was even stronger, and Appleby
wondered, when the voice rose again.
"Run the gaff topsail back to the masthead, boys!"
It took several of them to do it, and more were needed before they
hauled the sheet home. Then the _Belle_ dropped away behind, though the
other vessel stayed where she was, half-a-mile under their lee quarter,
a pyramid of swaying sail.
Jordan laughed softly as he glanced towards her over his shoulder. "Old
man Carter's most as stubborn as a mule," he said. "Well, we'll have
more wind by and by, and I'm figuring we'll see things then. I don't
know any reason you shouldn't get your dinner in the meanwhile, boys."
They trooped below, and there was no great change when they came up,
except that the _Belle_ was farther astern and the sea seemed to be
getting steeper. They swept on before it all afternoon, and the men
were a little more silent when, with a great rolling in of smoky
vapours, nightfall came. It was now blowing tolerably hard, but while
the seas frothed white as they surged past high above the rail, the
_Champlain_ still drove on under all her lower sails. She was swept by
bitter spray, and the man who held her straight was panting at the
wheel, but the vapours rolled down thicker and the _Belle_ and the
_Argo_ were indistinguishable. Niven was lying in his bunk when
Stickine came down, and his face was a trifle grave, while, as he flung
off his dripping oilskins, there was a great thud and gurgle forward,
and something seethed across the hatch.
"Put her nose in that time," he said. "Well, we've got to shake them
off, but we're taking steep chances already, and we can't press her as
we're doing very long."
"Could you make the others out?" asked a man, and Stickine laughed
silently.
"No," he said. "Still, we will do if the moon comes through. I know
old man Carter, and he'd run her under before he'd let us beat him. It
wouldn't take them long to get the spare gaff on the _Belle_."
He flung himself into his bunk as he was, and Appleby, who had heard
him, asked no questions. He began to realize that these big,
good-humoured sealers could on occasion be very grim, though this was
not a cause of much astonishment to him, for he had seen already that it
is not, as a rule, the domineering and ostentatious who take the
foremost place when the real stress comes. He slept, but it was
lightly, for the roar of the sea about the bows and groaning of the
hard-pressed hull roused him now and then. At times he seemed to feel
the great beams and knees straining above him and the tremulous quiver
of the vessel's skin, while when for the fourth time he wakened suddenly
a shower of brine came down with a hoarse voice through the scuttle.
The light of the swinging lamp showed that Niven was sitting up wide
awake, and in a few more minutes they crawled out on deck with several
of the men.
A shower of stinging spray beat into their eyes, and when he could see
again, Niven had a disconcerting glimpse of a big frothing comber
apparently curling above the schooner's stern. The decks ran water, but
when he glanced aloft every sail but the topsail was drawing still, and
he clutched the rail when as they swung upwards a blink of moonlight
pierced the flying vapours. To leeward of them lay a schooner, her hull
just showing faintly black through the white smother that seethed about
her, until she hove a breadth of it up streaming in a leeward roll. It
appeared insignificant in comparison with the mass of dusky sail that
swayed low again towards the rushing froth as she lurched back to
weather, and then Appleby glanced aft with a little thrill to the grim
set face of the man who stood panting at the _Champlain's_ wheel.
The hiss of the seas that followed, the roar at the bows, the wild
humming of the blast and the whirling spray stirred his blood. They
were all of them tokens of what man could dare, and the strain, that
human nerve could bear, for he knew that already hemp and wire and
timber were being taxed to the uttermost, and that if the helmsman gave
her a spoke too much or too little the next sea would curl on board or
the great black mainsail jibe over and strew the _Champlain's_ decks
with ruin. Niven stood beside him, and Appleby saw that although his
face was almost colourless in the moonlight, his eyes were shining.
"Oh, it's great!" he said. "Worth all we stood on board the _Aldebaran_
to have a hand in this."
"And how many hands were ye born with when I see two av them holding ye
where ye are?" said Donegal, who apparently heard him. "Is ut dollars
or diversion a man goes to sea after?"
Niven laughed. "Dollars. Oh, get out! You know you feel it yourself,"
he said. "You've got everything just throbbing inside you as I have
now."
Donegal grinned broadly. "And what if you're right?" he said. "'Tis
born in the blood av the likes av me, but if I was the son av a ducal
earl it's sorrow on the day would find me on the sea."
He got no further, but grabbed the lad's shoulder and held him fast as
the _Champlain_ swerved a little and a sea came in. It swirled about
them icy cold as she rolled down to lee, and the scuppers were spouting
when with a wild lurch she swung back to weather. Then Donegal thrust
the pair of them aft together.
"Get a good hold an' keep it, until we have some need av ye," he said.
Then the blink of moonlight went out and the _Champlain_ was alone,
while the two lads shivered and dodged the spray as she swept onwards
through the night, until a faint light crept out of the east across the
whitened sea. The wet canvas showed black against it, there was a
doleful wail of wind, and then when man's strength sinks to its lowest
something happened. The _Champlain_ put her bows in, and Jordan sprang
suddenly up on the deckhouse gazing astern. What he said was scarcely
audible, but the sealers apparently understood it, for the deck was
filled with scrambling men. Down came the mainsail's peak, forward a
slashing sail slid down, and the outer jib thrashed furiously above the
bowsprit. Niven was clawing his way towards it when Stickine grasped
his shoulder and flung him back.
"I guess this is going to be work for a man," he said.
Niven, who watched him crawl out along the bowsprit, held his breath
when spar and man dipped into the sea, and then floundered aft to where
the others were rolling up the foot of the half-lowered mainsail. It
slatted and banged above them, and now and then the long boom beneath
the foot of it that ran a fathom or more beyond the stern, swung in, for
the schooner was coming up to the wind, but the rush and stress of the
race had stirred his blood, and when it became evident that somebody was
wanted there, he swung himself up on the foot-rope beneath its outer end
as he otherwise might not have done. In another moment Appleby was up
beside him, and Jordan standing at the wheel glanced dubiously at them.
Then he nodded.
"You've got to begin sometime," he said.
It was not easy to keep a grip of the foot-rope, and more difficult
still to roll up the sail and tie the reef points round it because both
hands were needed and to hold on they must lie across the boom. Still,
they accomplished it, and Appleby felt content when Jordan made a little
gesture as they sprang down. He was not a man who said more than was
necessary, but it was evident that he was pleased with them. Then they
hauled at the halliards with the rest, and in a few more minutes they
were once more on their way under easy sail.
"She's snug for a while, but we'll have the trysail handy," said Jordan
quietly. "Old man Carter was a little slow. They're catching the heft
of it on board the _Argo_."
Appleby glanced down to leeward and saw the _Argo_. She was hove down
with one side lifted high above the sea, and loose canvas thrashing all
over her.
"I'll figure he'll just save his masts," said Stickine. "Wouldn't snug
her down till we did. Well, I figure Carter couldn't help being born a
mule."
Then the _Argo_ grew dim behind them, and they swept on into an empty
sea, for the race was over, and there was no sign of the _Belle_.
*CHAPTER X*
*HOVE TO*
At noon next day, Jordan once more brought the _Champlain's_ head to
wind, and they put the third reef in her mainsail, while when she swept
on again the sea grew steeper behind her, until the combers that raced
after her apparently hung frothing above her helmsman's head. She would
fling her stern up to meet them and while the man panted over his
jerking wheel her bowsprit went down and down. Then she would leisurely
lift her nose and surge forward lapped in seething foam, only to sink
with a smooth, swift lurch again.
It was dryest aft, though there was water splashing everywhere, and the
two lads hung about the mainmast where the little deckhouse partly
sheltered them, watching the helmsman's grim face as he swung with his
wheel. They knew, by this time, that, while it is a somewhat difficult
affair to keep a hard-pressed vessel straight before the sea, unpleasant
things are apt to happen to a fore-and-aft one if it is not done.
Still, the man knew his work, and did it, and at last, towards
nightfall, when the sea was all spray and foam, Jordan, who came up,
stood staring astern. After a minute or two he shook his head.
"We had better round her up while we can," he said. "Get the main-gaff
down, and you'll be handy with the trysail."
They were very handy, and there was a good many of them, but Appleby
held his breath when the foresail was lowered, and the mainsail peak
swung down. Jordan was still looking astern, and he nodded after an
especially big sea went smoking past them.
"We'll try it now," he said.
The man beside him swayed with the wheel, the _Champlain_ swung round to
windward, and there was a roar when a roller burst into spray upon that
side of her. Then she swung further yet, and as the big mainboom came
down the little three-cornered trysail went thrashing up the mast.
Everybody was doing something amidst a great banging of canvas, and in
another few moments there was a wonderful quietness. Appleby gasped,
and Stickine who went by dripping grinned at him, while Jordan nodded to
the men.
"She'll lie easy now," he said.
In place of running before it the _Champlain_ lay almost head to wind,
rising and falling with now and then a little lurch to leeward and a
curious buoyancy. The strip of sail above her bowsprit and the trysail
aft just sufficed to hold her stationary, and it was with little more
than a spray wisp at her bows she bobbed in a curious cork-like fashion
to the sea. Except for one or two of them the men crawled away below,
and the lads, who were wet through, were glad to climb down into the
stuffy warmth beneath the hatch.
It was dark down there now save for the flickering radiance of the lamp
which shone upon the wet brown faces and the smears of smoke. The dusky
hold reeked with the smell of steaming clothes, but the lads had grown
used to odours which would have sickened them before they went to sea.
Niven shook off the oilskins Jordan had given him, and as usual
commenced his questions.
"The sea looked nasty before we brought her up," he said. "How was it
we scarcely shipped any of it?"
"It was," said Stickine dryly. "Still, Ned Jordan knows his business,
sonny."
Niven did not care for the epithet, or the grin which usually
accompanied it, but he had discovered that one has to put up with a good
deal that one does not like at sea.
"Of course!" he said. "But why couldn't we have gone on running?"
Montreal, the man who sat nearest the stove, laughed softly as he raised
his head. "Listen to it. That's why!" he said.
There was a moment's silence, and while the _Champlain_ rolled to
leeward, and the floorings slanted under them until no man could have
kept his footing, all could hear the scream of the rigging ring through
the roar of the wind. It was a significant answer, but it left a little
that was not quite plain yet, and Stickine nodded when Appleby glanced
at him.
"It works out like this. A time comes when she'll run no longer--and
then it's too late to heave her to," he said.
"Yes," said Appleby reflectively. "Of course if the sea was too bad to
run before it would be too big to bring her up in, because while she was
swinging round she'd catch it on her beam. Still, if you had run too
long what could you do?"
"Just nothing," said Stickine gravely. "Wait until she ran under and
took you down."
He stopped, and there was a thud that sent a little shiver through two
of the listeners as the _Champlain_ plunged into a sea, for they had
been taught sufficient to see the picture the brief words called up. In
the silence that followed Brulee leaned forward with a curious
intentness in his eyes.
"_Comme ca!_" he said, swinging down a brown hand with suggestive
suddenness. "I have seen it. We come down from Labrador in the
_Acadie_ brig, and it is blow the grand ouragan."
He drew in his breath, and gazed into the dimness as though he saw none
of those about him, and then with a little shake of his shoulders
stretched out a finger and pointed to Niven. "I was as young as him,
and it was in the clear of the moon when the _Acadie_ was hove to, one
brought me to the rail to see the _Madeleine_. She was topsail schooner
which load with us, and we had all the friend on board her. Whether she
will not heave to, or the captain he is dare too much, I do not know,
but she comes up from the spray and pass close, so close. I see the
topsails black in the moon, and the jib she lift high. Then she is over
run the sea, and I shut tight my eye. It is in a moment I look
again--and there is no more _Madeleine_."
Again there was silence, and Donegal nodded sympathetically when the
French-Canadian turned away his head. "_Ave!_" he said. "For their
good rest."
It was a minute or two before Niven, who had shivered a little at the
tale, spoke again. "He told us the captain dared too much," he said.
"Sure!" said Donegal. "Is that perplexing ye, an' am I to stuff ye with
wisdom so ye can spill it out av ye? Still, that wan's easy. 'Tis the
daring ye want at sea, but ye must dare just so far, an' when it's
necessary, for the man who does not know when the conthract is too big
for him is going to have it shown him what he is. Ye can follow me?"
Niven was not quite sure that he did, but Stickine smiled grimly as he
nodded. "It's quite plain figuring. He's a blame fool," he said.
Appleby stared at the speaker with a faint perplexity, for while there
were occasions when Donegal the sealer and his comrades talked arrant
rubbish they now and then brought truths the lad had scarcely realized
home to him in a fashion that carried conviction as well as astonishment
with it. He wondered whether the sea had taught them, or there was
something that opened the eyes of the thoughtful in the simple life they
led. It was one which at least demanded qualities that were an ornament
to any man, and more often than not the primitive virtues which humanity
cannot rise beyond showed through what some would have deemed his
comrades' coarseness. Once or twice as he listened it was dimly borne
in upon the lad that while manhood was a greater thing than culture or
refinement all that was most worthy in it was founded on a few eternal
verities.
Niven, however, could not be serious long, and presently he laughed at
Donegal as he turned over to dry his other side before the little stove.
He felt luxuriously contented to lie there in the stuffy warmth, and
listen to the growling of the seas.
"There was something Stickine was to tell us--about a fifty-year-old
schooner, and a crew of starving men," he said.
Donegal nodded. "That ate the rats? Get up on the hind legs av ye,
now, an' talk, Stickine."
There was a little murmur from the rest, and the big, lean-faced
Canadian looked uneasy. "Pshaw! You've heard that tale before," he
said.
"Some av us," said Donegal. "An thim would hear it again. The others
has not, and they're waiting on ye anxiously!"
The men murmured approval, and Stickine shook out his pipe with a little
deprecatory gesture. "I'll make you very tired, boys, but if you will
have it this is how it was," he said. "It was 'bout through with the
afternoon watch when the fog shut down on the four of them in the whaler
in Russian water. They heard the schooner's bell, but it's kind of
difficult to fix a sound in a fog, and when it let up sudden they
allowed they'd lost her."
"Sure!" said Donegal. "Mainsail Haul could tell ye that in a fog ye
hear the sounds in front of ye behind ye. It is digressing ye are,
Stickine, but the boys is wondhering what four sealermen were
squandhering their time luxurious for in a whaler."
Appleby understood the comment, for he had seen a couple of whale boats
on the beach at Port Parry, and they were costly examples of the
boat-builder's skill. Stickine, however, laughed silently.
"Old man Corliss got her for nothing--and she was built for the
Government with flooring gratings fore and aft, but we needn't worry
'bout how he did it now. Well, there they were, with a big lump of a sea
running, shut in by the fog, and they had to keep her head-to with the
oars when the wind came down."
"Fog--and a breeze!" said Niven, and Donegal shook his fist at him.
"'Tis bethraying the ignorance av ye, ye are again," he said. "Up there
'tis fog for ever except when 'tis a gale, an' before it's through with
that the fog crawls in again. Ye will not heed the lad, Stickine."
"Well," said the sealer, "they held her head to wind, until just before
sun up a gunboat came along, and she come that sudden they'd no time to
heave the seals they'd with them over before she was going hard astern
close alongside of them. The first look at her kind of sickened them.
She was a Russian."
"There was fog--and they stopped there?" said Montreal.
"They did. There was quick-firer turned right down on the boat," said
Stickine dryly. "Well, it was all fixed up inside five minutes. The
whaler was hove up, and a guard with side-arms marched them before a
Russian officer, and he was quite anxious to know where they'd last seen
the schooner. Now, it was kind of curious there wasn't one of the boys
could remember."
"Had they been sealing inside the limits?" asked Appleby.
"No, sir," said Stickine. "Not that time, anyway. When they last saw
the land they were well off shore."
"Then the Russians had no right to seize them, and the Canadian
Government could have made them pay up thousands of dollars," said
Niven.
A little, grim smile crept into the faces of the men. "That," said one
of them, "is where you're wrong. They had all the right they wanted when
they had the men and guns, and who's going to believe a poaching sealer
when an officer in kid-gloves tells quite a different story?"
"And have British subjects no redress?" asked Appleby with a little
flush in his face, and Montreal grinned at him with grim approval.
"Oh, yes, when they can get it--and they do now and then, though they
don't usually worry the Government folks at Ottawa," he said. "They
took them to Peter Paul, Stickine?"
"They did," said Stickine. "And they kept them most of eight months
there cooped up in a loghouse with a little dried fish to eat, and 'bout
half enough sour black bread. They wouldn't tell the officer where that
schooner was, you see, and when they're not put down on the papers men
in prison get kind of forgotten in that country."
"And you believe it has happened--to Canadians?" asked Niven with a
little gasp of anger.
The veins swelled up on Montreal's forehead. "Well, there are sealer's
boats, British and American, that get lost, and nobody but the partners
of the men who pulled in them and a woman or two away down south worries
very much," he said. "I had a brother in one of them."
There was silence for almost a minute before Stickine went on again.
"Two of them got very sick, and they all got thin, until when the spring
came they were walked out every day with a guard to take care of them.
Perhaps the officer figured it would be kind of awkward if they died on
his hands and then somebody remembered them. Well, one day nigh sundown
the mate and a sick man were sitting on the beach looking at the sea,
and wondering if their folks in Canada would ever hear of them again.
They were to be sent away from that place in a day or two.
"Now, there was an old schooner that must have been getting shaky when
the Russians seized her years before moored in front of them. The oakum
was spewing from her seams, her bulwarks were worn and weather-cracked
so you could put your fingers in the rents in them, and it wasn't much
use telling a sealerman what kind of canvas she would have after lying
there since the Russians took her in the rain and wind. Still, she
looked kind of homely, and they sat there watching her until they heard
the boom of gun and there was a Russian soldier signing to them. Now,
some of those folks were kind enough, but this was a bad man, and when
the sealer who was sick couldn't get along fast enough he kicked him
hard, and where it would hurt him."
Montreal drew his breath, and a little grey patch showed in his cheeks.
"But," he said hoarsely, "he didn't do it again!"
Stickine laughed a curious little laugh. "No," he said. "He meant to,
but the man who wasn't sick was too quick for him, and the soldier
wasn't handy getting his side arm out. The sealer took the point in his
arm, and it ripped it to the wrist, but he got his right fist on that
soldier's chin, and when he went down he made no great show of getting
up again. Then the other two left him, and went back to the prison
where a soldier locked them in, and when the rest heard what had
happened they did some talking. They didn't take long about it, for the
mate had a notion the soldier looked very sick when he left him, and it
was quite plain that anything they did must be put through before they
were marched away from sea.
"'We've got to light out of this right now,' says one.
"'Well,' says another, 'where are we going to?'
"'That,' says the mate, 'is quite easy. There's a schooner handy and
we're going straight to sea.'
"Nobody said any more for a little, and the boys looked kind of solemn.
It was a long way to British Columbia, and they knew what that schooner
was like because they'd see her. Then one of them gets up.
"'I'd sooner drown out yonder than work in the mines,' says he.
"In 'bout five minutes they'd fixed up the thing, and there was one of
them waiting behind the door when a soldier came in. Before he got
started talking the man had his arms about him. Then there was a circus
that didn't last very long, and the soldier was lying tied up quite snug
with his tunic round his head when they slipped out one by one. The
moon was getting up, but it was hazy with a little breeze blowing out to
sea when two of them lit out for the place where the schooner was lying
while the rest went for the beach where it was nearest them. There was
a boat or two handy, but they were big, and you can't get a vessel
that's been lying by for years off in a minute. When the two stopped
abreast of her the water was very cold, and it isn't quite easy swimming
in your clothes, but they knew if they took them off they would have to
go home naked, and made the best of it they could, though one of them
was played out when they fetched the vessel. They couldn't get a holt
of her, and the tide swung them along bobbing and clawing at her side,
until the mate got his fingers in a crack the sun had made. Then he got
up, though he was never quite sure how it was done, and pulled the other
one after him, but they fell down on deck and lay there a minute,
anyway.
"After that one crawls to the foremast, and it was while he made shift
to get the foresail on to her he found out what prison and hunger had
done for him. It wasn't a big sail, but he sat down faint and choking
when he'd got it up. Then he found where the shackle was on the chain,
and smashed his fingers as he pounded it, for the pin was rusted in. He
couldn't quite see straight and his hands were bleeding, but he figured
they'd got to light out quick, for there was a dog howling and he could
hear a boat coming. At last, when he knew another blow would knock out
the pin, he let up and he and the other man tried to get the mainsail
up, and stopped because they'd 'bout the strength of Mainsail Haul
between them. Then while they stood there gasping a boat comes banging
alongside, and the rest was crawling over the rail when the mate hears
another splash of oars behind.
"'They're coming along with rifles,' says somebody.
"Well, there was nobody wanting to waste any time, and they got the
mainsail up with a split you could have ridden a hor
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