“So, you see, I'm betwixt and between in the matter! It's like settling a question by flipping a cent. And I'll tell you what I'm going to do!” He smacked his palm on the table. He strode back toward the stateroom door. “Mate, ahoy, there! Sailor to sailor, now, and remember that you have asked something of _me!_ If you were captain of this schooner would you marry off these two?”
They waited in silence, in which they heard the whummle and screech of the wind outside and the angry squalling of the sheathing of the plunging schooner's cabin walls.
The voice which replied to Captain Downs's query did not sound human. It was a sort of muffled wail, but there was no mistaking its positiveness.
“No!” said the man behind the door.
Back to the table lurched Captain Downs. He pounded down his fist. “That settles it with me!” Then he poised his big hand on the edge of the table-cover. “I was ready to tip one way or the other and it needed only a little push. I have tipped.” Down came the palm flat on the table-cloth with final and decisive firmness. “Young man,” he informed Bradish, “there's an extra stateroom, there, off this dining-saloon. You take it!”
“What can I tell my father?” wailed the girl, the fire of her determination suddenly quenched by sobbing helplessness.
“You can tell him that I temporarily adopted you as my daughter at three bells on this particular evening, and I'll go to him and back you up if it becomes necessary.” He opened the door leading aft and bowed. “Now, you trot along to your stateroom, sissy!”
After hesitating a few moments she hurried away. The skipper locked the door and slipped the key into his pocket.
“Do you think I'm going to--” began Bradish, angrily.
“I ain't wasting any thoughts on you, sir. I'm saving 'em all for the _Drusilla M. Alden_ just now.”
The craft's plunging roll gave evidence that the sea was making. At that instant the first mate came down a few steps of the forward companionway, entering through the coach-house door.
“She's breezing up fresh from east'ard, sir!” he reported.
“So I've judged from the way this sheathing is talking up. I'll be on deck at once, Mr. Dodge.”
That report was a summons to a sailor; Mayo came staggering out of the stateroom. He looked neither to right nor left nor at either of the men in the saloon. He stumbled toward the companionway, reaching his hands in front of him after the fashion in which a man gropes in the dark.
“Are you letting a nigger--and a crazy one at that--decide the biggest thing in my life?” raged Bradish.
“I know what I'm doing,” Captain Downs assured him. But the skipper was manifestly amazed by the expression he saw on Mayo's face.
“I won't stand for it! Here, you!” Bradish rushed across the room and intercepted Mayo.
“Come away from that man!” commanded the skipper.
But Bradish was not in a mood to obey authority. “There's something behind this and I propose to be let in on it! Stop, you!” He pushed Mayo back, but the latter's face did not change its expression of dull, blank, utter despair which saw not and heard not. Mayo recovered himself and came on again, looking into vacancy.
“If you have a grudge against me, by the gods, I'll wake you up and make you explain it!” shouted Bradish. He drew back his arm and drove a quick punch squarely against the expressionless face. The blow came with a lurch of the vessel and Mayo fell flat on his back. He went down as stiffly as he had walked, with as little effort to save himself as a store dummy would have made.
But he was another man when he came upon his feet.
Bradish had awakened him!
The master of the _Alden_ hurried around the table, roaring oaths, and tried to get between them, but he was an unwieldy man on his short legs. Before he was in arm's-length they were at each other, dodging here and there.
Bradish was no shrimp of an adversary; he was taller than his antagonist, and handled his fists like a man who had been trained as an amateur boxer.
They fought up and down the cabin, battering each other's face.
The indignant master threatened them with an upraised chair, tried to strike down their hands with it, but they were in no mood to mind a mediator. They fought like maddened cats, banging against the cabin walls, whirling in a crazy rigadoon to find an opening for their fists; Captain Downs was not nimble enough to catch them. Uttering awful profanity, he threatened to shoot both of them and rushed into the main saloon, unlocking the door.
“I'm coming back with a gun!” he promised. But the fight ended suddenly in a wrestling trick.
Mayo closed in, got Bradish's right hand in a grip, and doubled the arm behind his adversary's back. Then he tripped the city man and laid him backward over the table and against its edge with a violence that brought a yell of pain and made Bradish limp and passive. Mayo held him there.
“My grudge, eh? My grudge!” the victor panted. “Because you wouldn't tell me how the sneaks ruined me? No! The girl isn't here now. I'll tell you! It's because you stole her self-respect and her good name, and it makes you too dirty a dog to be her husband!”
He picked up Bradish and threw him on the floor. When he turned he saw the girl's white, agonized, frightened face at the crack of the saloon door.
“Captain Downs!” she shrieked, “that negro is killing him. He's killing Ralph!”
The victor turned his back on her and lurched around the table on his way out. He stroked blood from his face with his palm, and was glad that she had not recognized him; and yet, her failure to do so, even though he was such a pitiable figure of the man she had known, was one more slash of the whip of anguish across his raw soul. For a moment they had stood there, face to face, and only blank unrecognition greeted him; it made this horrible contretemps seem all the more unreal.
Mayo did not pause to listen to the ravings of Captain Downs, who came thrusting past her. Dizzy, bleeding, half blind, he rushed up the forward companionway and went into the black night on deck.
The mate was bawling for all hands to shorten sail, and Mayo took his place with the toilers, who were manning sheets and downhauls.
XXIII ~ THE MONSTER THAT SLIPPED ITS LEASH
And there Captain Kirby proved a coward at last, And he played at bo-peep behind the mainmast, And there they did stand, boys, and shiver and shake, For fear that that terror their lives it would take. --Admiral Benbow.
Rain came with the wind, and the weather settled into a sullen, driving, summer easterly.
Late summer regularly furnishes one of those storms to the Atlantic coast, a recrudescence of the wintry gales, a trial run of the elements, a sort of inter-equinoctial testing out so that Eurus may be sure that his bellows is in working condition.
Such a storm rarely gives warning ahead that it is to be severe. It seems to be a meteorological prank in order to catch mariners napping.
At midnight the _Alden_ was plunging into creaming seas, her five masts thrummed by the blast. With five thousand tons of coal weighting her, she wallowed like a water-soaked log.
Mayo, who was roused from his hideous agony of soul at four bells, morning, to go on deck for his watch, ventured as near the engine-room door as he dared, for the rain was soaking his meager garments and the red glow from within was grateful. The ship's pump was clanking, a circumstance in no way alarming, because the huge schooners of the coal trade are racked and wrenched in rough water.
The second mate came to the engine-room, lugging the sounding-rod to the light in order to examine the smear on its freshly chalked length.
He tossed it out on deck with a grunt of satisfaction. “Nothing to hurt!” he said to the engineer. “However, I'd rather be inside the capes in this blow. The old skimmer ain't what she used to be. Johnson, do you know that this schooner is all of two feet longer when she is loaded than when she is light?”
“I knew she was hogged, but I didn't know it was as bad as that.”
“I put the lead-line on her before she went into the coal-dock this trip, and I measured her again in the stream yesterday. With a cargo she just humps right up like a monkey bound for war. That's the way with these five-masters! They get such a racking they go wrong before the owners realize.”
“They'll never build any more, and I don't suppose they want to spend much money on the old ones,” suggested the engineer.
“Naturally not, when they ain't paying dividends as it is.” He stepped to the weather rail and sniffed. “I reckon the old man will be dropping the killick before long,” he said.
Mayo knew something of the methods of schooner masters and was not surprised by the last remark.
In the gallant old days, when it was the custom to thrash out a blow, the later plan of anchoring a big craft in the high seas off the Delaware coast, with Europe for a lee, would have been viewed with a certain amount of horror by a captain.
But the modern skipper figures that there's less wear and tear if he anchors and rides it out. To be sure, it's no sort of a place for a squeamish person, aboard a loaded schooner whose mudhook clutches bottom while the sea flings her about, but the masters and crews of coal-luggers are not squeamish.