The Project Gutenberg eBook of Under Rocking Skies, by L. Frank Tooker.

Published October, 1905

COLONIAL PRESS
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U.S.A.

For a quarter of an hour Thomas Medbury had been standing at the east window of his mother's parlor, gazing out across his neighbor's yard with an eager intentness that betrayed a surprising absorption in a landscape without striking features and wholly lacking in any human interest. The low-studded room in which he stood was closely shut and darkened, having about it the musty smell peculiar to old houses. There were sea-fans before the fireplace, flanked on each side by polished conch-shells. On the wall hung an oil-painting of the brig[Pg 4] North Star, with all sail set, and at her foretruck a white burgee, with her name in red letters, standing straight out in half a gale of wind. Family portraits in oval gilt frames were ranged with mathematical precision along the remaining wall-spaces, and on the mantelpiece stood a curious collection of objects brought from far lands—carved ivories and strange ware from China, peculiar shells, a Japanese short sword, and a South Pacific war-club. No one would have needed to be told that it was the home of a sailor.

Indeed, a keen observer might have guessed it from the young man himself. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and bronzed to the color of overripe wheat. His eyes had the steady, far-seeing look of the seaman, but were not yet marked about by the crow's-feet that the glare of the sun on the sea brings early in life. It was, moreover, a strong face, straightforward and[Pg 5] pleasant, and irradiated by an almost boyish eagerness.

Suddenly he leaned forward with quickened interest as the door of his neighbor's house opened, and there stepped forth a short, stout man of sixty, who stood a moment for a last word and then hurried down the boxwood-lined path. He, too, was clearly a sailor: he walked with his feet far apart, like a man so habituated to the rolling deck that it seemed a waste of time and energy to alter his gait on the rare occasions when he trod the firm ground. Medbury perceived that his face wore a look of placid satisfaction, and with the tightening of the lines of his own to an unspoken resolution, he hurried through the house and across the yard, and, vaulting the low dividing fence, approached his neighbor's back door.

He lifted the latch without knocking, and at once came face to face with a wet-eyed young woman standing at a table and listlessly[Pg 6] cutting out sugar-cookies with a tin mold. A child of four, leaning against her, reached eagerly for the cutter, and a boy of ten sat near the stove, softly crying.

"He's up-stairs, packing. He's going out with Cap'n Joel March," said the young woman, tragically. The boy by the stove broke into a wail, and she turned sharply toward him.

"Do stop it, Bobbie!" she exclaimed. Then she walked toward the door to call her husband.

She returned at once, her husband, tall, brown, and wiry, walking behind her with the subdued step of a culprit who feels that by stepping softly, smiling unobtrusively, and gainsaying no man, he may escape, through his humility, what he deserves for his misconduct. His good-natured face lighted up at sight of Medbury.

[Pg 7]"Bob," said Medbury, without other prelude than a nod, "I want you to do me a favor: don't go out this trip with Cap'n Joel."

"Why, that's a funny thing to ask, Tom," he said wonderingly. "Annie's been at me, of course; but I don't see what odds it makes to you. It's a good berth, and it don't seem right to let the chance go by. Besides, I've promised the old man. I can't back out now."

"But he promised me he'd stay home a spell," broke in his wife. "He thinks that's nothing. He's just got home, after being away eleven months. Why, baby didn't know him!"

Under the concentrated gaze of her elders, the child contemplated her father as a blinking puppy might have looked at an object that, from being unfamiliar and terrifying,[Pg 8] had gradually become an accepted but still unexplained phenomenon. But presently she turned to Medbury.

"Him gived me a pen-n-y," she said, with a serene gravity that seemed to concern itself with the fact as a historical statement rather than as a personal gratification.

"He did, did he?" he exclaimed. "Well, he doesn't deserve to have another if he can't stay home and get acquainted with you." He seated himself, and, with the child snuggling against him, turned to her father again.

"It's a shame, Bob, after promising Annie. Mother says she hasn't talked about anything for six months except your coming home for a while. She said you were going to paint the house and fix things up, and she's been running around asking everybody about the best kind of paint, and planning[Pg 9] where to set out shrubs and make flower-beds, and dig up a little garden for the children. And now you run off at the first chance!"

"Why, I don't see why you take it so to heart, Tom," said Bob, smiling, but a little grieved. He felt they ought to feel that he did it only for the best.

"Well, I'll tell you why: I want to go myself. I asked Cap'n Joel to take me, but he wouldn't hear to it. Now, if he can't get anybody else, he's bound to let me go in the end."

"Why, you're going to have the new bark! What do you care for—" Then all at once his face broke into a comprehending grin. "Oh, I see," he added. He sat for a moment smiling down at the floor. "All right, Tom," he said, looking up at last. "I'll do it. I wouldn't for anybody else. I really didn't want to go, but I felt I ought to.[Pg 10] But what I'm going to say to the old man—" He looked at them with a troubled face.

"Nothing," replied Medbury, promptly. He turned to the boy, who was listening eagerly, the new hope of keeping his father at home brightening his tear-stained cheeks. "Bobbie, go over and tell my mother you want my fish-lines; then run up to Cap'n March's and tell him your father can't go, after all. And hurry right back; your father's going to take you fishing."

The boy went out of the door and over the fence with a wild whoop of unrestrained joy. Medbury caught up a hat and put it on his friend's head.

"You'll find my boat under Simeon's shop; everything's in her," he told him. "We'll send Bobbie right down. And hurry; the tide's right for fishing now. You want to get right off." He laughed boyishly. Then he gently pushed Bob toward[Pg 11] the door and watched him going down the street.

"Well, that's done," he said to Annie, and stepped outside, with his hand still holding the latch. Suddenly he looked back. "Annie," he said, "tell Bob I want him to go out with me as mate when the bark's finished. Of course that's six months away; but tell him to keep it in mind." With that he hurriedly closed the door.

The boy returned, and followed his father, and five minutes later Captain March turned in at the gate. His face was no longer placid, but wore a look of annoyance. Medbury, watching him, saw him go away a moment later, hurrying toward the harbor, taking shorter steps than usual, and biting his bearded under lip in his perplexity.

"Seems kind o' mean to bother the old fellow," Medbury said to himself, looking troubled. He shook the feeling off as he added: "I guess it's for his good. Now[Pg 12] he'll look up Davis; he's the only man he can get."

As he passed out of his gate, Annie called to him from her doorway. She was smiling.

John Davis was sitting in the shipyard watching the carpenters setting up a stern-post for a new vessel, and there the captain found him. Medbury, watching them, saw them go away together; but at the corner of the Shore Road and Main street they separated.

"Just shipped with Cap'n Joel," Davis[Pg 13] replied, not slacking his gait, but rather increasing it, as befitted a little man, sensitive as to his size, when walking with a long-legged companion.

"That's what I wanted to see you about," Medbury told him. "You're not going." He smiled, but he glanced uneasily at Davis out of the corners of his eyes.

Davis stopped and looked at him. He was a middle-aged man with a red beard and an uncertain temper, and now he stared at Medbury with flushing face. Then he broke into a laugh.

"It's no joke," said Medbury, patiently. "I've got to go. I can't tell why—just now; but some day I may."

Davis gazed up and down the street with an abstracted air; but all at once he drew himself together and exclaimed:

"Well, I'll be—" He broke off suddenly, and, turning sharply, began to walk back to the village.

"It's mighty good of you, John," Medbury called humbly. "I'll make it up to you somehow—see if I don't."

[Pg 15]"Make it up!" cried Davis, stopping in the road. "I don't want nothin' made up. You made it up, years ago, when you got me out of that affair in Para. You didn't ask no questions that night; nor when you run across our bar in that no'theaster to fish up my boy when his boat capsized. I don't know what you're up to, and I don't care. It's all right." He waved his hand lightly, as if to dismiss all obligations, and departed in search of Captain March.

But half a dozen steps away, Medbury heard him laugh, and turned to see him standing in the road, looking back.

"Just this minute saw what you was aimin' at," he called to Medbury. "Well, good luck to you!" And, grinning to himself, he went his way.

"Now," thought Medbury, "if Cap'n March'll only keep his eyes open for the rest of the day, I guess he's not going to miss seeing me. I shall be near, but not[Pg 16] too near. Only I wish I knew of something to hurry him up before too many people laugh and wish me luck."

With something of the serene imperturbability that was a part of his habitual attitude toward life, the Rev. Robert Drew sat in a rocking-chair on the little porch of his house and, slowly rocking, looked out across the waters of the placid bay while he awaited Captain March's summons. For twenty-four hours he had scarcely stirred from home, that he might be in instant readiness for departure on the coming of the captain's messenger; but the messenger still tarried, and the Henrietta C. March, lying quietly at anchor off the harbor with her mainsail up, seemed no nearer to sailing than she had been the day before.

It was early in March—March that had come in like a lamb and now lay drowsing[Pg 18] under a sun that hourly reddened the buds and gleamed white on the salt-meadows and the shining boles of trees. There were bird-calls at intervals; barnyard fowls sunned themselves in garden spaces and sent up cloudy veils of dust: the life of the earth was awakening. Drew could see dark specks about the harbor's mouth: he knew that the boats had begun to go out for flatfish. The thought of even that mild activity moved him to impatience, and, getting to his feet, he walked to an open window and looked in.

"Mother," he said, "I'm going to find Captain March and get some reason from him why he doesn't sail. He can get a good mate, I hear; I don't understand his delaying. I'm tired of it. If he isn't going, I wish to know it, and arrange for a vacation elsewhere."

"Very well, Robert." His mother looked up brightly. Her son as an instrument of strenuous aggressiveness amused her. She[Pg 19] had the sense of humor, which he had not inherited, and it was this sense that lured her on to add: "Don't say anything that you may regret."

"Oh, no," he answered gravely, and went away, leaving her to the silent laughter that always seemed to him, whenever he was a witness of it, as something peculiarly elusive and almost pagan.

In all Blackwater there was no cooler spot than Myron Beckwith's boat-shop. Facing the Shore Road, and standing on piles, with big sliding doors opening at each end, on a hot summer afternoon one could always find a cool breeze drawing through it and hear the water lapping about the piles beneath the floor. The panorama of village life passed by on the Shore Road, and at the back doors one could sit and watch all the activity of harbor and wharves and see the vessels going up and down the sound. To sailors ashore and to idlers in general it was an[Pg 20] attractive spot. Here Drew found Captain March standing in a little group near the rear doors, ruminating on life.

"No," he was saying, "things go best by contraries. A sailor ought to marry a girl from the inboard, who doesn't know a scow from a full-rigged ship and is just a little scart at sight of salt water. A man like the dominie here," he added, as Drew halted by the group, "ought to marry a girl who's never been under conviction and has got a spice of old Satan in her. That's what gives 'em variety and keeps 'em interested. When you know just what you're going to have for your meals every day, you kind o' lose interest in your eating."

"Dominie," said Jehiel Dace, "you ought to get the cap'n to supply your pulpit while you're off on your vacation. He's a good deal of a preacher."

[Pg 21]"'Twouldn't be a bad notion if we'd all change places now and then," replied the captain. "We'd appreciate each other better. I don't know but I could preach about as well as the dominie could run the Henrietta C. I ain't so sure about the prayers. One thing, there's several in that congregation I'd like to talk at."

"Nothin' to hender you from freein' your mind as it is," suggested Dace, brightening at the prospect. "You don't need no pulpit for that."

"No," he said with an air of finality, "it wouldn't be official. Wisdom has got to have authority to give it weight. Otherwise it's just blamed impudence."

"That's so," admitted Dace; "that's a good deal so. See what a man will take from his wife without—"

[Pg 22]"There he comes!" he exclaimed, and gazed steadily through the open window.

All eyes, turning in the same direction, saw a horseman galloping down the Mount Horeb road. He descended the hill, was lost to sight behind the rigging-loft, flashed past a bit of the Shore Road, and was hidden again for a moment while they heard the thunder of his horse's feet on the mill-creek bridge. Captain March seated himself and, with knees wide apart, faced the land-side door.

In front of the shop a boy threw himself from a panting horse. He walked straight up to Captain March, and in much the same manner that a courier might announce defeat to a king, said:

"That settles it," said the captain. "I heard Simeon Macy was ashore, and I thought maybe I could get him for mate.[Pg 23] Now I've got to go to the city this afternoon and look one up."

No one spoke, but every man in the group except the captain and Drew thought of Thomas Medbury, and wondered how far a man might be justified in letting personal reasons override necessity when his vessel was loaded and ready for sea.

Some one touched Drew on the shoulder and he turned quickly. It was Deacon Taylor, anxious to talk over again the debated subject of a new heater for the church. When Drew was again free the captain was gone.

"My wisdom touchin' wives reminded him that his had sent him on an errant," answered Dace. "He went to the market. I suppose by now he's tryin' to explain to[Pg 24] his wife how he happened to be three hours late with the meat for dinner."

At the market Drew was told that Captain March had gone home. When, after a momentary hesitation, Drew had gone thither, it was only to find Mrs. March sitting by a window, apparently watching for her recreant husband.

"And he wanted roast beef for dinner," sadly remarked that good lady after she had told the minister that she knew no more about her husband's whereabouts than she knew where Moses was buried. She turned her face from him for an instant.

"It is twelve o'clock, lacking seventeen minutes," she added in a tone that suggested the tragic stage. Drew hurried away.

When, after a hopeless search for the missing mariner, he wended his way homeward half an hour later, he smiled to himself as he wondered if it was not just as[Pg 25] well: he could not for his life tell what he could have said to urge the captain to sail. At his gate he came face to face with a breathless small boy.

"Mr. Drew," he gasped, "Cap'n March he says—he says—you be at—Myron's boat-shop—boat-shop by half-past one—yes, sir. He's goin' to sail." Then he disappeared.

In wonder Drew hastened up to his house, to find his mother kneeling on the floor and strapping a satchel.

"I've just put some crullers and a glass of jelly in your bag," she told him, without turning. "I don't suppose you'll get a thing that tastes like real cooking. And I put your winter flannels in, too. It will be cold nights, and you will sit out on deck and get chilled through. Now come to dinner."

"I don't understand this sudden haste," said Drew, as he took his seat at the table.[Pg 26] "I saw the captain an hour ago, and he showed no signs of any impatience to be off. It seems too good to be true."

"He says the same of you," she told him. "But if you really get away you owe it to your mother. I am the god out of the machine—I. I was tying up the flowering-currant bush by the fence, and Captain March came by. He was hurrying, my dear. I never saw him hurry before. What do sailors say—rolling both scuppers under? Yes; it was like that. I called to him and asked him if he had seen my son. Yes, he had. Then I told him that if he didn't sail soon you would need a second vacation to recover from the nervous strain of waiting for this one to begin. I let him know how you had done nothing for two days but sit by your baggage and start at every sound. I told him, too, that you were constantly worrying lest something should happen to keep[Pg 27] you at home at the last minute; so the sooner you got away the better."

"Oh, I put it strongly—trust me for that. He said he had seen you, but you had said nothing. I knew it would be like that. Oh, you were two Buddhas sitting under the sacred Bo-tree, contemplating eternity. Isn't that what the Buddha is supposed to do? You were like that, you two, anyway. Well, he explained everything. He told me that two men had promised to go out with him as mate, but changed their minds. He thought it queer. Another asked to go, but, for personal reasons, he didn't want him. But as soon as he knew just how you felt he said he'd go right off for this man. I thought it very good of him. I hope the man isn't a rough character. But, Robert, you didn't tell me that his wife and daughter are going." She looked at her son reproachfully.

"I believe he did mention the fact that his wife and little girl were going, but it made no impression on me," Drew told her. "I have scarcely thought of it since."

"Well, I suppose you knew of her, though they don't attend your church." Then she changed the subject with an abruptness that was so characteristic that Drew's thoughts slipped away from the question he had been about to ask. "But, do you know," she said, "I think he decided to go partly because he forgot his meat for dinner and he's afraid of that round, good-natured-looking little wife of his. His hurry to get away now looks as if he'd been too busy finding a mate to get[Pg 29] home earlier. He told me about it with an intimate chuckle that seemed to take me right into his family closet and introduce me to the skeleton."

As Drew made his way through Beckwith's boat-shop half an hour later and stopped at the wide sliding doors at the rear, a large yawl was lying at the float. Three sailors sat on the thwarts, leaning forward with the characteristic rounded shoulders and relaxed look of idle seamen. Up the long plank walk from the boat hurried a tall, beardless young man of twenty-eight or thirty. He walked with a swinging gait, his shoulders were well back, and his face wore the look of one whose thoughts were pleasant.

He glanced from Drew to his baggage, then back to Drew again, and smiled, showing firm white teeth.

"Mr. Drew?" His voice suggested a query, but went on again immediately, without[Pg 30] waiting for an answer: "Tumble in. The old man's gone aboard. He wouldn't wait."

He paused while Drew gathered up his baggage, but did not offer to assist. The American seaman is no burden-bearer for other men.

The sailors in the boat turned incurious faces as they heard the two draw near, then quickly rose and held the yawl to the float till they were seated in the stern-sheets. In silence the oarsmen then took their places, shipped their oars, and at Medbury's word sped away.

"It's not yet the hour Captain March set for leaving," he said. "I hope I did not misunderstand it."

"Oh, that's the old man's way," replied the other, lightly. "Now that he's really off, he can't hurry fast enough—had to get[Pg 31] Myron to take him out in a sailboat while I was to wait for you."

"Born here, and my father and grandfather before me. I guess that makes me a Blackwater man, all right. My name's Medbury. You know my mother; she goes to your church."

"Yes, indeed. Now I understand why I've never seen you," he said. "Your mother told me that you had not been home for more than two years. I've not been here so long. She is very cheerful in her loneliness; I often stop in to talk to her."

"Yes," answered Medbury, soberly; "she told me. It does her lots of good. She thinks a great deal of you." He paused a moment, and then said: "I've promised her to take no more long voyages. She's getting old, and I'm all she's got."

[Pg 32]"That's good," said Drew, heartily. He was very fond of the bright-faced old woman who had lived to see the covetous ocean take all but her youngest boy, and was quite prepared to like her son for her sake.

The Henrietta C. March was a brig of five hundred tons burden, and was bound for Santa Cruz in the West Indies; and Captain March had stopped off his home port to take aboard his wife and daughter and Drew, who had been given a long vacation by his church. The mate of the brig had been taken suddenly ill, and for two days the captain had been trying to get a man to fill his place.

It was with an impression of almost Crusoe-like loneliness that Drew found himself upon the deck when they reached the brig at last, and the mate, with the crew at his heels, had gone forward to swing the boat to her place on the center-house, and then[Pg 34] to the windlass to heave the chain short. Drew set his baggage down on the deck and, walking forward, watched the men heaving at the windlass, the jar and clank of which filled the vessel. On the quarter-deck the captain, in his shirt-sleeves and wearing a shapeless brown hat, walked back and forth, occasionally glancing aloft at the fly, which was beginning to straighten out in the freshening southwest breeze. His wife and daughter were nowhere in sight.

The clank of the windlass grew slower and slower as the cable shortened, and every moment or two Medbury glanced over the bow. Finally he raised his hand above his head, and the men came trooping down from the forecastle-deck, some going aloft to loosen sails and others going to various stations with a businesslike directness that seemed to Drew to be under the guidance of wordless intuition. He stood leaning against the fore-rigging as two came toward[Pg 35] him with the unseeing look of men who, having a duty to perform, recognize no obstacle, and, gently pushing him aside, began to throw to the deck the coils of running rigging against which he had been leaning. He moved from place to place, always finding himself in the way and being pushed aside with the silent directness that seemed purely impersonal, until at last, throwing off his coat, he began to pull with the rest. In silence they made place for him. For a time he found his hands catching awkwardly at halyards and braces and slipping over and under other harder hands; then at last he caught the swing, and his body rose and sank with the bodies of the others, and his breathing came heavily and thickened with theirs. The minister had found himself.

It was not until the brig slowly paid off, heeling before the fresh breeze, and the outward-bound song began its chant about her forefoot, that he gathered up his baggage[Pg 36] and went aft. Captain March was at the wheel.

"Go right down and make yourself to home," he said. "They'll show you your room. I declare, you take a hold like an old hand. We'll be sending you aloft in a few days."

As he went down the companionway and stepped across the cabin, he saw the round little form of Mrs. March kneeling before a locker in what was to be his room. She turned her head at the sound of his footsteps.

"I thought I'd tidy your room up a bit," she told him. "Gracious knows, it needs it. You'd think it started out as a carpenter shop or sail-loft, but got discouraged and ended up just plain litter. I guess Cap'n March has left house-cleaning out of his almanac. And he said this room was clean!"

[Pg 37]"Oh, I am sure it will do nicely, Mrs. March," Drew replied. "My mother says I'm fond of a comfortable disorder."

"I guess men are all alike in that," she said: "they like a clutter—they think it's having things handy. But I hope you'll excuse my back," she went on. "I was just telling my daughter that I was almost ashamed to show my face to you. There I was scolding about Cap'n March being so late, when all the time you and he were so anxious to get off and he scurrying around to find a mate. I declare, sometimes it seems as if the good Lord didn't do his best by women when he gave them tongues. They're like drums to little children—make a dreadful noise and keep them from better things."

Drew smiled. It seemed clear that the captain had used some latitude in explaining his late return home. Meanwhile Mrs. March was backing out of the room.

[Pg 38]"There," she said; "it's in a sort of order, if you don't look too close."

"I am sure the room couldn't be better, Mrs. March," he said. "It seems to me delightfully cozy and neat."

"I'd 'a' been better satisfied if you hadn't mentioned its being so nice. I've noticed this about men folks, that when things suit them, they don't notice them. When Cap'n March talks and acts like a man right out of the Bible, I'm sure he's been up to mischief, or else has something unpleasant on his mind, one."

"Then I'm going to cultivate wise silences, Mrs. March. I'll give you the impression of a man walking in a dream. I have come on[Pg 39] this voyage to learn things; you are not letting me lose any time."

"Oh, if you came to learn things, you'll be wasting time by talking with the rest of us: you must go to my daughter here. She's been called to that, you know—to teach all men and nations." Her voice held a curious note: pride, resentment, anxiety, all seemed to marshal themselves in the words.

Drew turned quickly at the one word, to see the daughter standing in the doorway of her room. He noticed that while the girl's brow was drawn in a frown, her lips had the undecided irregularity of curve that hinted at a smile suppressed. This study of particulars did not make him any the less alert to a general impression of striking beauty. He smiled and bowed somewhat elaborately, to which the girl returned a curt little nod, though her answering smile was friendly.

[Pg 40]He had the tact to seem not to recognize the tension and to turn to other subjects, and he now said, with a heartiness that seemed to have long been waiting for expression, that they really were off at last. His glance at the hanging lamp over the table, gently swaying in its gimbals, had the effect of bringing the corroborative testimony of its motion to their notice, while he went on to add that it seemed too good to be true. He said that ever since the brig had anchored off the harbor he had been haunted by the fear that something would happen at the last moment to keep him at home. Not till now had he felt safe.

"It's the other way about with me," said Mrs. March. "I shall not feel safe till I get home again. If the Lord meant for us to go wandering about on the face of the waters, he would have made them steady enough to build roads on. If he put people 'way on the other side of the earth, he meant[Pg 41] them to stay there—and us, too," she added lamely, but with sufficient clearness.

"You don't mean to say that you are afraid of the sea, Mrs. March," he asked, "after all your voyages?"

"I've been going with Cap'n March off and on for twenty-five—yes, thirty—years," she answered; "yet I never go out of sight of land without feeling that I'm making faces at my Maker and daring him to punish me."

"Oh, mother's fear is her most precious possession," said the girl, now for the first time coming forth into the cabin. "Nothing has ever happened to her at sea; and that, she feels, is the best reason for thinking that something is bound to happen the next time." She put her hand on the elder woman's shoulder and smiled down on her from her greater height.

[Pg 42]"Well, that's reasonable," retorted Mrs. March. "I was never one to shut my eyes and claim it wasn't thundering. I've got my hearing. What does the good Lord give us feelings for if he doesn't mean us to use them?" With this challenge to unbelief in design in nature, she went to her room.

Captain March was still at the wheel when Drew returned to the deck. Medbury was forward with the crew, busily stowing the anchor. Little by little, Blackwater was disappearing behind the high white cliffs. Drew took up the glass which lay in its box against the frame of the sliding hood of the companionway and looked toward the village. Even as he looked, the white spire of his church disappeared from view. He saw it vanish, and put the glass down, to see the girl standing in the companionway watching the changing shore.

"I've seen the last of my church for three[Pg 43] months," he said to her; "now I am really loose and free."

"It's good to get away from responsibility for a while," she said. "I feel now as if I could dismiss all thought and worry until I return. Then things may look different to me. I am going to think so, anyway."

"Hetty," said the captain, "just run down and get my pipe off my desk, won't you? You're younger than I am. Besides, I'm busy." He turned to Drew. "Ashore I smoke cigars mostly; my wife says a pipe's low. But here I'm master." He looked about his little kingdom with a mild, complacent face.

His daughter brought his pipe, and, with the gentle look not yet gone from his face, he was filling it when a boyish-looking lad came aft along the starboard side of the house, sent by the mate to take the wheel. Drew, watching the captain, saw his face change. As the lad came to the quarter-deck,[Pg 44] the captain pointed a stubby finger at him. "You—" he began harshly, and then hesitated and glanced at his daughter. The boy stopped and turned a frightened look upon the captain.

"Ah," said the captain; then he added: "Didn't you learn the le'ward side of a vessel?"

The boy gave a startled look aloft, and then, with a flaming face, turned quickly and came back along the lee side of the house. The captain gave him the course, and without another word walked over to the rail, where his daughter stood with Drew.

"Sometimes they forget, sometimes they're green and don't know, and sometimes[Pg 45] it's just impudence," he said in a voice that the boy could hear. "No matter which it is, ninety-nine times in a hundred the sailorman who does it tumbles right into trouble. This happened to be the hundredth time."

"Do you mean to say," she asked in a low voice, "that you might have punished that boy for coming aft on the wrong side? You could see he had forgotten or didn't know. Would you?"

"I am going to parade—parade up and down that gangway by the hour!" she told him.

She did not stay to listen, but went indignantly away; at the cabin door, however, she turned and came back.

"You wouldn't have done it," she told him; "I know you wouldn't." She stooped—she was taller than he—and kissed him lightly. Then she went below.

The wind freshened as night came on, and had a touch of winter in its sting. They were now running fast by the coast, the high cliffs of which rose dark and desolate on the starboard. The water was black, save where it ran hissing along the sides in a ragged[Pg 47] gray ribbon of foam. Behind them, in the west, a crimson flush lingered in the sky. Drew stood at the break in the poop-deck, watching the shadowy forms of the crew moving about the deck forward as they made the royal snug for the night; far overhead he could hear the pennant halyards slatting against the topmast in the dark. Every taut line and halyard sang in the breeze, and there was a dull, humming roar in the canvas; under the lower sails, across the deck, the wind swept crackling and keen.

He heard the mate's last "That's well; belay!" and watched him come aft. He passed without speaking, then hesitated and came back.

"After we get through the Race," he said, "we'll begin to get the swell." He spoke absent-mindedly, as if he were thinking of something quite different; then he walked to the rail and sat down. Drew followed him.

[Pg 48]Leaning his elbows on his knees, Medbury sat for a long time without speaking; at last he looked up with a little laugh.

"I'd give something to be out of this," he said. "I was a fool to come. I might have known better. It's funny, but a man may know a woman all his life, and at the end of the time know as little about her as if he'd never seen her—that is, really know her—how she'll take things. Now, I suppose this was the very worst thing I could have done. All that I've got to do is to wait till she gets ready and she'll tell me so. Oh, I can see just how she'll look and what she'll say! I don't need to have her tell me. 'You might have thought of my feelings!'"—he changed his voice,—"that's what she'll say. And I—" he broke off impatiently.

"You don't? Why, mother said she told[Pg 49] you all about it one time when you were at the house; she said she had to tell some one. That's how I felt to-night, and I thought you knew."

"Ah!" he said. Then he went on: "Yes, she told me; but she did not tell me the young lady's name. It is Miss March?"

"Yes," Medbury answered. "I thought you must know. You'd have been the only one in Blackwater if you hadn't. Sometimes I feel like the town clock, with every one watching my face. That's one reason why I like the China seas; I can't get farther away."

"Your mother told me very little," said Drew; "she was worrying about your not coming home, and lonely, and it did her good to speak. It did not seem to me a hopeless situation as she told it. Captain March strikes me as being a reasonable man."

"I guess she didn't tell you all, then.[Pg 50] Well, I was thinking of what she said and how much she thought of you, and, thinking you knew, I made up my mind to ask your advice. I felt that I had to talk to some one." He hesitated a moment and then, with a boyish laugh, went on: "You see, Hetty and I had always been pretty good friends from the time we went to school together. Well, I've never got over it. When I first went to sea she used to write to me; but after a while she went out to Oberlin to live with an aunt while she went to college; and as I was half the time on the other side of the world, we kind of lost track of each other. I guess she lost track of me more than I did of her, for she's changed since I saw her last, three years ago, and I can't quite make her out. She's friendly enough, but she's different, and has come home with a wild notion of going out to China as a missionary. Good Lord! a girl like that to be thrown away on those—" He could think[Pg 51] of no word strong enough to convey his contempt. "Well," he went on, "I can't see any place for me in that plan, but that doesn't seem to trouble her. That's what worries me. Of course the old man's set against her going; but he's set against me, too, because I'm a sailor. That's the way things stand. When I heard she was going out with her father this trip, and the mate was sick, I rushed off to the old man and offered to go with him. He wouldn't hear of it, and engaged two others; but I saw them privately, and they backed out. The old man can't understand why they did. To-day he came to me, and here I am. I've been offered a good vessel, and I intended to stay home a spell; but when I heard Hetty was going, it seemed to me it was my last chance—to go with her; but I guess it was a mistake. I can see she thinks I've done a foolish thing, and is angry."

"I think I can understand how she feels[Pg 52]—how most women would feel," said Drew, slowly, after a long pause. "Her sense of justice is outraged—perhaps that's too strong a word; but she feels that you have taken an unfair advantage of her in leaving her no way of escape. She might not have cared to escape, but she likes to feel that retreat is open to her. A woman fights at a disadvantage in these things; she is more sensitive to public opinion than are men, and she has the instinct of a hunted creature. I don't know that I can make it clear," he concluded hopelessly. "Then, too, I may be wholly wrong."

"Well, I don't know what I am going to do, now I'm here," said Medbury, forlornly.

"I should say, attend strictly to business and see her as little as possible for a while," Drew told him. "As for her anger, that may be a good sign. If she were simply indifferent to you, she wouldn't care. She[Pg 53] could leave it safely to time to make your coming ridiculous."

When Drew entered the cabin, an hour later, Hetty sat at the table reading, shading her eyes with her hand; her mother sat knitting near her; and on the lounge her father reclined, pipe in mouth, his hat on the floor beside him. Blinking in the strong light, Drew sat down without removing his overcoat.

"Ain't you going to stay a while?" asked the captain. "You can't make church calls to-night."

"No," he said; "that's true. I'm out of that. But I'm going back on deck soon. I can't get enough of it: the world seems all sky and stars. I had lost sight of the fact that the earth is so trivial."

"That's a good deal so," he said. "Still,[Pg 54] there's enough earth lying loose around the Race to keep me from forgetting it, at least till we've dropped it astern. I guess I'll go take a look up on deck."

"That will be our last sight of land, won't it?" she asked. "I'm going up to say good-by."

"I guess ministers are used to people coming to them with all their troubles," she began, with a plaintive little note creeping into her usually cheery voice, "and I do hope you won't think I'm trying to spoil your vacation by troubling you with ours; but Cap'n March and I have talked and talked till we ain't on speaking terms with[Pg 55] our own judgments any more, and what to do next I don't know." Then she, too, told the story.

"What she thinks of Tom I don't know; she's awfully close-mouthed about some things. I like Tom, and if I had my way I guess I'd let the young folks settle it themselves. But Cap'n March he's different. He's going to take it for granted that she won't think of Tom because her father disapproves of her marrying a sailor; and he will be so sure of it, and so exasperating, that I don't know what he'll make her do first—marry Tom or go right off to China. In the end he'll let her do just what she makes up her mind to do. He always did, and he always will. If it's one thing, I don't care; but to think of her going off alone to the other side of the world—" She picked up her work and began to knit rapidly, with fast-falling tears.

[Pg 56]Drew sat with his elbow on the back of the chair, his chin in the palm of his hand, looking down at the floor.

"I wish I knew what to say—to advise, Mrs. March," he now said; "but I do not. Perhaps after a while—"

"Yes," she broke in eagerly; "that's all we could expect. I told Cap'n March I was going to speak to you, and he seemed real pleased. I'm sure you'll think of some way out," she added, with the cheerful optimism with which we shift the burden of our desperate affairs to the shoulders of others. It is hard to believe that Fate will continue unkind when our friends are moved. "And I hope," she went on, "that you won't feel it a duty to encourage Hetty's missionary notions. Of course you're a minister and believe in missionaries, and I shouldn't ask you to go against your conscience; but I suppose you can believe in them without thinking that everybody's fit for the work.[Pg 57] I'm sure Hetty isn't. All the missionary women I ever saw were thin and homely, and their clothes seemed just thrown at them. Hetty isn't a bit like that. I can say so, if she is my daughter. And I've scarcely seen her for three years; and if now she should go away to live at the end of the world among heathen idols, with not a homelike thing, and no one to mother her when she needs mothering, then I think that religion is very kind to the heathen, who don't want it, and very cruel to a mother who has always been a God-fearing woman and only wants her child near her when she comes to die. She's all I've got."

She had been speaking with increasing rapidity, but now a light footfall sounded on deck, going aft, and she stopped.

"Go up on deck," she said to Drew. "I don't want her to know I've ever mentioned this to you. She's a dear girl, but sometimes I feel like a hen who is the mother of a duckling.[Pg 58] What she's going to do next I don't know."

"I've been showing father the stars," she said. "He, a sailor, and not to know them! I told him I thought it shameful."

"Oh, yes; he knew that. The others didn't seem to impress him. He said they were too shifty to be of much use."

"I think there are some folks who know so much that it kind o' clogs their brains and keeps them from working right," said Captain March, coming up behind her. "I have an idea that we can use just about so much, and all over and above that is just pure waste. I once had a mate that was like that. He could name all the stars, too, and knew a good many things of that sort that didn't help him much to find his longitude;[Pg 59] but as for the look of the sky, or the heave of the sea, or the feel of the wind, that meant nothing more to him than so much blank paper. Now, when I walk the deck at night and look up and see the stars shining overhead, winter or summer, they're company for me. That's enough for me; what men call 'em I don't care. I suppose the good Lord's got his own names for them."

Hetty stayed on deck till Little Gull Island light came abreast; but when she had gone below the captain sought out Drew as he stood by the main-rigging and told him his daughter's desire. He made no mention of Medbury.

"Her mother thought you might help us," he concluded; "and I hope you can, for we're in sore trouble. Still, I don't ask you to advise against your conscience. Now I say, 'No,' to her; but if she feels she's got to go, and doesn't change, why, I shall say, 'Yes,' in the end. I know that. My father[Pg 60] always wanted me to stay ashore, but I was wild to go to sea. It seemed that I had to go, and in the end I did. I don't know that I got all I expected, but I got what I wanted; and if my girl sets her heart on this as the only way for her to lead her life, why, I sha'n't put a stone in her way when once I'm sure. It wouldn't be right."

Hetty had spread a shawl on the forward end of the house, and, with her arm resting on the slide of the companionway, sat with an unopened book in her lap and looked out across the shining sea. It was three bells or more, and the morning sun was warm upon her face, and painted with rainbow hues the spray that the fresh northwest wind clipped from every toppling wave. The brig was sliding down the seas like a boy let loose from school, now dipping her nose into a long roller with chuckling hawse-pipes, now sinking into the blue hollows, sending the sheeted spray outward for yards as her counter came home with a jarring thud. The spars whined unceasingly,[Pg 62] but the sails, bellying in the steady breeze, made scarcely a sound, save when a sudden lurch spilled the wind from the canvas, and it snapped like a great whip.

The scene, with the vividness of its new sensations, now for the first time experienced, impressed itself upon Drew's mind as something wholly mysterious and strangely moving. After the first night, when there had been no sea, he had remained steadily below, too ill to rise; but the sickness had now passed, and it was with only the uncertainty of gait of one not yet accustomed to the motion of the vessel that he had made his way to the deck and looked out over the watery world.

With a sense of aloofness, of absolute separation, from all that he had ever known, he gazed about him. The words,

[Pg 64]
flashed[Pg 65] through his mind: the perfect poem seemed strangely interpretative of his mood. Then his gaze came back from the notched and leaping horizon to the silent figure of Hetty, and, with the lifting spirit of a mind released from the oppression of a strange and portentous solitude, he clumsily made his way to her side, glad for companionship.

"Oh," she said, "I was wishing for some one to enjoy it with. I tried to get my mother, but she would not come up. She said she could feel it; that was enough for her. I hope it is not enough for you."

"No," he answered; "there is more in seeing it: it is strange and overwhelming. I am inland-bred, you know: I feel as if all known things had passed away."

"To me it is like coming home," she declared. "I cannot remember when it was not familiar. Now it is like lifting the latch of the door at home after a long absence."

"I cannot imagine any one thinking of it as companionable, as a part of actual experience. I need hills and old trees and remembered turns in roads to feel the intimacy of the world. This is strange and beautiful, but leaves me an alien. It is like a kaleidoscope: nothing is twice the same."

"I do not care for things that are twice the same," she told him. "Here something is always likely to happen. The only certain thing I know of to-morrow is that we shall have plum-duff." She laughed.

"A certain noble discontent—you know the thought—is well; but—" he was thinking of her mother's concern, and her words carried him toward it; yet he hesitated, doubtful if it might not be too soon to speak—"but constant change means lack of purpose, doesn't it? If you set your heart on something,—something vastly different[Pg 67] from anything you have ever known,—it will be fruitless of good unless persisted in—unless it wears grooves in your life. A mere impulse for change is to be distrusted." He smiled and added: "Don't think that I cannot give over preaching."

"I know what you mean," replied the girl, looking seaward with troubled eyes. "I suppose mother has told you what I wish. But it isn't a mere desire for change, and everybody's disapproval only makes me more eager to go. Isn't that a proof that the desire is something to be obeyed—a real call? How can I be sure that it is not, unless I try? Do you think me a silly person?" She looked at him with a suggestion of defiance, but smilingly, too.

"I should be the last one to think that," he told her. "Only look at it from all sides—that is all your friends can ask."

"Not father," she answered laughingly. "If I can be made to look at it from his[Pg 68] point of view, he will willingly spare me the rest. Poor father! But let's not speak of it," she went on. "Look! the Mother Carey's chicken!"

She pointed to the bird, the black-and-white little creature which always seems to be hurrying home, wherever it may be. Far to the southeast a trail of smoke from an unseen steamer blotched the white sky. On the main-deck the second mate and a sailor were patching a topsail; from the galley drifted aft the cheerful whistling of the steward, like a flock of blackbirds, and the homelike sound of rattling pans. Only the man at the wheel was aft, now bending to the spokes, now glancing at the binnacle, and now turning his eye aloft to the luff of the mainsail. It was the morning of the third day out.

"You must not think that I do not care[Pg 69] for your advice," she said gently; "I do—shall some day. Just now I cannot bear to speak of my disappointment. It wasn't a sudden impulse; it was a part of my life, and it must be given up, perhaps. After a little, when I can collect my scattered forces, if you can help me—" She smiled uncertainly.

"I know, I know," he hastened to say. "But I was really thinking of something quite different—that three days ago I had not even seen you; now our lives seem intimately near. Only at sea could that happen."

"Yes," she agreed; "people grow into friendship quickly at sea—and grow apart as quickly. I have heard my father say that is a reason for the cruelty and harshness on shipboard—that men's tempers become warped when they cannot escape from one another and they find no common ground for companionship. He says there have been[Pg 70] times when he fairly hated a mate of his. On shore they might have been intimate for years without an unpleasant thought."

He wondered if Medbury had been in her thoughts. They had scarcely spoken, he had observed. He himself had seen little of the younger man, and he was quite prepared to rate him her inferior, in spite of his physical attractiveness. He seemed a mere boy in his impulses; he doubted not that he would keep his boyishness to the end of life. Certainly, he told himself, he was lacking in her capacity for growth.

Meanwhile his own first opinion of her beauty had not changed; it was as apparent as ever, he told himself, and had taken on an added grace with his widening knowledge of her many changing moods. As he gazed at her now, he had an impression of distinction, but distinction united with a certain[Pg 71] gentleness that, he told himself, was rare. Her face was in profile, and the mouth, clear-cut and undrooping, had the softness of outline that he associated with good temper. Her eyes, though now sad, had the same gentle look. He liked her thick brown hair and the clear oval of her face: they gave him the impression of harmony. In spite of his first feeling of attraction for Medbury, he felt that the girl hesitated wisely; he could see no road by which the two could travel as equal companions. That Medbury's hopes seemed destined to be shattered did not move him greatly; for rarely to the masculine onlooker is the disappointed lover a tragic figure. One has seen him play his game and lose; now let him bear the loss manfully.

They did not speak of her desire again that day; indeed, eight days passed before he ventured to refer to it. Meanwhile they had become great friends. The pleasant[Pg 72] weather had held, and they had rolled down the long, smooth seas, which daily seemed to grow bluer, under a sky that remained cloudless.

It was morning again, the morning of the eleventh day out, and they sat in the same place, with much the same scene about them, though now with a tropical softness flooding the world, and less heeded as their thoughts turned more to themselves. He had been reading aloud while she worked at some trifle, but suddenly he closed the book.

"Mine are poor enough; I prefer those of others. Besides, I have scarcely thought of them for days."

"Don't!" she appealed. "Don't! I am not yet ready to face them. I have lost my courage."

[Pg 73]"I will say no more," he said; "but I had thought that you seemed different—ready to surrender. I had hoped so."

"Can you believe that?" he asked. "I had thought that I was for you—as we all are."

A step sounded on the forward companionway, and Medbury appeared. He glanced past them to the man at the wheel, looked aloft, then walked slowly to the break of the deck. Suddenly he came back and seated himself on the corner of the house near them. Apparently he had wearied of self-suppression.

He was manifestly trying to appear wholly at ease, and he began to talk at once, and[Pg 74] very rapidly, like one repeating a speech that had been learned by heart. He spoke of the wind and the run of the vessel, and he told them that they had not touched a sheet for more than sixty hours. He said he hoped that it would last, though he added that he doubted it.

"When ought we to get out, Tom?" asked Hetty. She bit off her thread as she spoke, and, spreading her work on her lap, examined it absent-mindedly.

"If the wind holds, in four or five days," he answered; "but I'm afraid it won't. The sea's beginning to look oily now; the snap has gone out of the wind. We'll be slatting and rolling in a dead calm by the middle of the afternoon. I noticed the change in my bunk, and couldn't sleep."

"I thought sailors could always sleep." This was Hetty's contribution to the conversation as she still studied her work.

[Pg 75]"Then we may be three weeks going out," said Drew. "It seems like a long time."

"I was a hundred and twenty days on my last voyage—from Singapore," said Medbury.

"I am beginning to grasp the reason for the sailor's rapt, far-seeing look," said Drew. "It is not strange that he never loses it, with his constant study of invisible signs and meanings. But a hundred and twenty days! What changes may take place in that time!"

"We find changes enough," Medbury answered. "Sometimes I think we sailors are the only things that do not change, except to grow older and sadder. We always hope to find everything just as we left it, but we never do."

Hetty looked steadily seaward, and a fine flush came to her face; but Drew was struck with the philosophy of the situation.

[Pg 76]"That surely ought to be true," he acquiesced—"that the sailor is the most unchanging of men. One should come back wiser in sea-lore, but solitude and the singleness of his purpose should keep him untouched by all the distractions that change other men. I've noticed in Blackwater the freshness of spirit, almost boyishness, of old men."

A hundred yards ahead of them stretched a great golden-brown field that looked like a salt-meadow in April. Above it wheeled a flock of sea-birds.

"Sargasso weed," he answered, and grinned. "It's always waltzing about in these latitudes."

The girl walked to the main-rigging, and,[Pg 77] leaning across the sheer-pole, watched the yellow plain with wondering eyes. A moment later, as they plunged into it, she caught her breath; it seemed incredible to her that there should be no shock.

Instantly the sounds of the sea were hushed; there was only the soft hissing of the weed as it swept past the side of the brig.

"Come up to the forecastle-deck and see it pile up on the bow," Medbury said to the girl.

He leaned across the sheer-pole with her a moment in silence. The bell forward struck four sharp strokes; it was like a cry in the night. Then a sailor came lurching aft to relieve the man at the wheel.

"About coming home unchanged, and finding nothing as you had left it. Of course he knew what you meant. And it wasn't true, for I have not changed. I could have sunk through the deck for shame."

A moment he stood looking outboard with unseeing eyes; then he stooped and drew a boat-hook from the slings beneath the rail.

He drew in a great bunch and spread it at her feet, and she picked up a bit with dainty fingers.

"It's no longer beautiful," she said in disappointment, and dropped it on the house.

The wind died out, as he had predicted, and all the afternoon the brig rolled on the long swells, which hourly grew heavier. They leaped against the horizon, swung onward beneath the keel, and swept past with the unrelenting persistency that seemed the embodiment of vindictive hate. A gale can be combated, but, in the grasp of a calm, man is helpless. Every part of the vessel cried out in protest. The canvas slatted and flapped like the wings of a huge bird vainly trying to rise from the waves; every block rattled and croaked; the main-boom, hauled chock aft, snatched at its sheets with a viciousness that threatened to part them at every roll and made their huge blocks crash;[Pg 81] from the pantry below came the constant rattle of crockery; and the blue sea, dipped up through the scuppers, swashed back and forth across the main-deck. By eight bells every stitch of canvas had been furled or clewed up to save it, and the brig lay rolling in the dark hollows like a drunken sailor reeling home.

At dusk Hetty made her way to the forward companionway, and, seating herself on the sill, with her hands clasped about the guard-rail, looked out across the watery waste. The line of her eyes, parallel with the deck, saw the stars fly downward till they seemed to vanish in the sea, which suddenly seemed to tower like a huge black wall above the brig; then suddenly it dropped away, and the stars flew up again, and she saw them fairly overhead. Out of the swashing flood of the main-deck, in a momentary lull, Medbury appeared.

"It's a nasty roll, and no mistake. There's dirty weather knocking about somewhere."

"Haven't you ever heard the sailors' rhymes about hurricanes in the West Indies?" he asked.

[Pg 83]That anchors March squarely in the middle of the safe months; so we're all right, you see. No, it isn't a hurricane."

He seated himself on the deck, and, leaning against the door-jamb, braced himself to the roll. For a while they sat in silence, and watched the long rollers infold them—three great ones, then a succession of lower ones, in an ever-recurring sameness that moved the girl with a growing nervousness. At last she turned to him and said:

"I wanted to explain to you that I had no reason to be ugly this morning. But what is the use? Father would always oppose; besides, I am not sure myself. I want to be friends, nothing more."

"Oh, I know. You always had a pair[Pg 84] of skittish heels, Hetty." He turned his face to her suddenly. "Is there any one else?"

"All right," he answered; "I'll hope on. I've been doing that a long time; I'm not going to stop now." He was silent a moment, and then he said: "Do you know how long that's been, Hetty? Fourteen years. We were in school then, and it began the day of that big snow-storm, when I drew you home on my sled. You wore a red jacket, and your cheeks were almost as red. I can see you sitting there now, and smiling whenever I looked back. You were the shyest little thing! When we reached your gate, you just slipped off and ran into the house without turning."

"I've thought of it under every star in the sky, I think. I guess that's the way it will always be with you—slipping away and[Pg 85] not looking back." He laughed a little dolefully.

"I'm not like that," she said in a low voice. "I may go away, but I shall look back. I am no longer a child."

"All right, Hetty. It will be as you say. I don't nag my—friends." He smiled forlornly.

In silence they watched the swells racing in. They were like living things, of incredible speed, insatiable, pitiless, rushing on to infold them. As the brig rolled in their grasp, the girl instinctively moved her body against the roll: it was as if she thought to lessen the awful dip of the deck with her puny weight; and whenever the great rollers passed, and the vessel, like a tired thing,[Pg 86] lay for an instant almost at peace in the lower levels of the sea, an involuntary sigh of relief escaped her. Medbury heard her and looked up.

"It's a regular cradle—as peaceful as that," he assured her. "Only we're a little old for cradles, I guess," he added.

Over them the stars raced back and forth; for there were no clouds, only a soft haze that made the stars seem large and near, but without brightness. Close down to the sea a whitish film seemed to spread, making the curtain of the night above it intensely black. Once, as they dipped to port, Hetty's eyes caught sight of a deep-red glow suffusing the lifted wave near the bow. She clutched at Medbury's arm.

"That? Why, the reflection of our port light. You poor thing!" he said pityingly. "Hadn't you better go below? It's queer, but on a night like this, or in thick weather, if you once lose your nerve, you see the queerest things. Come, you'll be all right below."

"No," she said; "now I will stay. There!"—she straightened herself and looked at him smilingly,—"now, I'll be sensible. Why do you look at me like that?" she asked abruptly.

"But that was different," she answered. "It was—" The look of yearning love upon his face moved her strangely. She[Pg 88] felt the impatient tears flood her eyes. Meanwhile he hastened to speak of other things.

"Do you remember how you used to tie your hair up in two tight little braids?" he asked—"always tied with red ribbon?"

"Mother did that," she answered promptly. "I hated it. I used to tell her they made my head ache. I've forgotten now whether they did or not. But it wasn't always red ribbon."

"Some things you've forgotten, you see," she told him. "It is easy to forget, after all."

The door of the passage below them opened, and some one stumbled toward them. It was Drew. Medbury slipped away, vexed at the interruption, but Hetty turned a relieved face to the newcomer. In this difference lay the measure of their love.

[Pg 89]Reaching the deck, Drew almost dropped in the place where Medbury had been sitting. He removed his cap from his head, and passed his hand across his forehead. From the forecastle floated aft, above the jangling noises of the brig, the faint strains of an accordion.

"Just at this moment I have no higher ambition than to sit out there and play like that," said Drew, turning his head to listen.

"It sounds rather nice at sea," said the girl. "Maybe it's because I've always heard it there that I like it."

"Oh, it isn't that," he replied. "It's the care-free touch I envy. Care-free—with all our fixed beliefs tumbling about us! See those stars! And we have been taught to call them steadfast!"

"You're seasick again," she said. "I knew it by the way you dropped to the deck."

"Well, you're honest; you ought to be proud of that," she told him. "Most men refuse to confess to seasickness until the fact confesses itself." She laughed.

"I might be proud of being honest if I were not too much ashamed of being ill. The lesser feeling is lost in the greater."

"You would feel better if you would not watch the rail. It's the worst thing you can do."

"But I am never affected," she replied. "Besides, I'm feeling reckless to-night."

It is strange, but there are times when to be called self-controlled is like an accusation.

[Pg 91]"Rather say it's calling you happy. I think there is no happiness without self-control," he replied.

"Do you call it happiness," she cried—"rolling like this? I think it is dull."

"All happiness is more or less dull," he declared. "It's the price it pays to discontent, which is supposed to know all the ups and downs of life."

In the silence that followed, his eyes, searching the night with the fascination in the thought of discovery that the sea gives even to the sighting of a sail, came back to her face and lingered there. For a moment he looked at her with the intent, impersonal gaze that he had directed toward the horizon. She was leaning against the guard-rail, with her hands clasped over her knees, and her[Pg 92] eyes turned up to the stars. Her head was uncovered, and her hair looked black above the gleaming whiteness of her face, which wore the intense look of abounding vitality that pallor sometimes gives in a larger measure than vivid coloring. As he watched her face in the dim light, he became distinctly alive to a new impression—the impression that he was becoming strangely drawn to her. The knowledge came upon him suddenly, like a ship looming above him in the night.

It was inevitable that his first thought should be of Medbury; but whatever he might later come to think of his own ethical implication, in this first moment of self-discovery the thought was little more than that he should have a care. In a rush of mental restlessness he rose to his feet and walked to the rail. He could hear the second mate as he tramped steadily back and forth on the quarter-deck, passing like a shuttle from[Pg 93] darkness to light as he crossed the glow from the binnacle-lamp. The thump of the wheel jumping in its becket was almost continuous; it irritated him as the louder noises of the sea and the vessel had not done. In the east a red light shone and vanished; again it appeared for a moment. He called Hetty's attention to it, but she did not rise. When it appeared again it was farther to the north.

"It's a steamer going home," she said. "It's like your happiness—just a dull light moving uncertainly through darkness."

"Oh, it's true," she persisted; "I can see it's true. I wanted to go away, but it was only discontent. If I had gone, it would have been the same. I should have been broken in the first struggle."

"To-morrow the wind will blow again, and you will see things in a different light.[Pg 94] Nothing will matter then," he assured her.

"Do you think I should have succeeded if I had gone?" She turned toward him sharply while she waited for his answer.

"I think you would have put your whole heart into your work," he said at last. "When we do that, we need not think of results—or fear them—need we?"

"I shall always feel that it was right for me to go," she said, after a pause. "The regret will remain."

"It is hard to say what is right, we owe allegiance in so many ways. A week ago your going was simply an interesting thought to me. Now I cannot bear to think of it."

It came to him vividly, with her conscious[Pg 95] refusal to follow his leading, that he was not having a care; and he added in haste: "I can see the tragic significance of such a decision, now that I am no longer a stranger—this putting away of all your old life—your father and mother. Think what it means to them! Life has many facets: we've got to look at them all."

"Yes," she said slowly, as if she were looking at them all in turn; then she continued: "But if we study them too closely, isn't there danger of being simply irresolute and accomplishing nothing?"

"To crown the present hour—might that not be the hardest, and therefore the noblest, task?" he asked smilingly. "A nature that is overwhelmed by its first disappointment will not be likely to succeed in any path. That is not yours, I am sure."

"It is easy for you to say that," she answered, with a touch of impatience; "you have found your chosen work; I must stay[Pg 96] at home. What can we women in seaports do? We tremble through storms, and then wait in fear for the marine news." She laughed at her own exaggeration.

"Is that all you ask of your work—to be made strong and hopeful?" she demanded. "It makes me think of life as a gymnasium."

"No," he answered frankly; "but I have not found my chosen work, or, rather, my chosen field."

"I shall be glad," he replied. "It is simply to work among the poor in a large town or city. I cannot go among the little children of the crowded streets without a heartache. That is where my work calls me. I love the people of Blackwater, and I can be happy there when I can forget for a time;[Pg 97] but I am not needed. Sometimes I feel that no one is needed, they are so firmly fixed in their beliefs, so hopelessly certain of themselves. But the little children of the crowded streets!" He broke off suddenly.

They heard the bell forward ring out sharply. Both counted the strokes in silence.

The forecastle door opened, and a shaft of light flashed like an opening fan along the wet, shining deck. Shadowy forms began to move about, and vanished in the darkness. Then the door was shut, and the deck was dark again; only the clamor of the rolling vessel and the sea about her went on unceasingly.

"I am glad you told me," Hetty said at last in a low voice that had in it a tremor of exaltation. She did not turn to him as she spoke, but kept her eyes fixed upon the lines of whitened waves glimmering in the dark.

He wondered at the touch of feeling in her tone, for he could not know that, having condemned him for a seemingly Laodicean contentment with life, with as little reason she was now prepared to exalt him unduly, seeing in his desired course a form of martyrdom at once moving and heroic. It was in the line of her own desire, and the thought flashed upon her that here was something even she might be permitted to do.

They had come tremblingly to the heights of emotion: a little thing might send the streams of their life together, or bear them farther and farther apart.

Day was breaking when Drew came on deck the next morning. The noises of the vessel, which had clanked and whined all night through his broken sleep, seemed to him to take on new life as he reached the deck; but the brig, as she lay rolling in the trough of the sea, had the gray, tired look of ships coming home from long voyages. There were no clouds in the sky, but the stars had faded out, and even as he gazed the rim of the sun appeared above the sea, flattened out on the horizon, then rose in an elongated ball. For an instant a red pendant seemed to cling to the far edge of the ocean; then it vanished, and the sun,[Pg 100] round again and red, had broken free. Day had come.

The ocean had the glassy aspect of the preceding day; as far as the eye carried not a catspaw darkened the surface. In every direction the white sails of the Portuguese men-of-war rose and fell on the long blue swells. Fifty yards astern the triangular dorsal fin of a shark moved slowly across their track. Drew watched its silent progress with the fascination that the landsman, seeing it for the first time, bestows upon it as the embodiment of the cruelty and mystery of its abode.

He turned at the sound of a footstep, and, seeing Medbury beside him, greeted him, and then nodded astern.

"Yes," replied the mate. "It's queer, but everybody seems to know them right off. Sort of natural dislike, I guess."

[Pg 101]Medbury watched it a moment and then looked aloft to where the fly hung limp.

"It beats all," he muttered; "there isn't air enough to float a soap-bubble." He walked to the pennant halyards, and, untying them, jerked the fly free from its staff. "It hasn't lifted an inch in fifteen hours," he said. "Confound it! I believe the world has died overnight!" Then he laughed at his own ill-nature. "It always gets on my nerves—weather like this," he explained to Drew.

He turned and walked to the other side of the vessel as Captain March came on deck. He also looked aloft, glanced at the binnacle from mere force of habit, and then swept the horizon with half-shut eyes. His face was inscrutable, and absolutely without emotion. "It's going to be hot," was his only remark. Then he walked to a camp-chair, and, drawing it to the rail, sat down, and began to whistle softly.

"I guess I'll rig up the triangle this morning and scrape the mainmast," he said. "It's a good chance."

"I'll start at the foot," continued the mate, as if in answer to unspoken criticism. "Maybe it'll breeze up before the men get much above the deck."

"I don't know as the crew's going to rise up and call him blessed when he orders them aloft on that job in a swell like this,"[Pg 103] said the captain to Drew; "but then, as I said, I don't know."

Then the barefooted crew came aft with buckets and brooms to wash down the decks, and he and Drew went below. When they came back to the deck, after breakfast, two men were at the grindstone sharpening their knives, and a third was scraping a bright pin-rail forward. Medbury sat on the forward end of the house, making double-crown knots in the ends of new man-ropes. He did not look up as Hetty and the minister came and stood over him, watching his work. Captain March came past the group in his morning walk.

"You're not going to scrape the mainmast, eh?" he said, as he went by. His eyes twinkled.

"Do you know, I had heard so much of the harsh treatment of sailors by their officers that I came on this voyage prepared for something of the sort, and dreading it," he said, in his slow, deep voice; "but I have seen nothing but consideration."

Medbury's mouth twitched with scornful amusement; it almost seemed to him that Drew had unknowingly called him pusillanimous. He was by no means a hard man, and was popular with his crews; but he was young and a certain amount of swagger seemed amusing, while, in addition, he had all the contempt of the American sailor for the stolid alien creatures who more and more were finding their way into the forecastles of ships that carried his country's flag.

"Yes," broke in Hetty, eagerly; "it is only a brute who will take advantage of his power. I have been going to sea all my life, but I have never seen cruelty. All the sailors I know are the largest-hearted of men. I hate the tales that blacken them."

"I have known them only ashore," said Drew, "and I certainly never knew a more joyous, open-hearted people—hardly the sort to make tyrants of." He turned to Medbury: "But you were going to say—?"

Medbury sharply drew the strands of his rope through the outer walling of the knot as he replied:

"I fancy," began Drew, "that sailors are too practical a class, too constantly surrounded by danger, not to know the value of self-restraint. It is wise to keep far from one the passion that fires the mind beyond[Pg 106] the point where the every-day work of living is accomplished with the least friction."

Medbury glanced up as he spoke, and caught the look that Hetty fastened upon the speaker. There was nothing in the quiet gaze beyond interest and the sympathy of kindred convictions, but it gave Medbury the curious sensation of standing apart from them, of being irrevocably alone. He turned away with a new pain about his heart. He was still thinking of Hetty's look when Drew, busily erecting his card-house of the sailor's life upon a foundation of calm philosophy, asked him if he had ever seen cruelty on shipboard. His tone was the confident one of the philosopher who, having formulated a theory, calmly awaits the facts that will establish it.

"You two might call it that," Medbury answered, not without a touch of resentment in his voice; "I shouldn't. It's easy enough to talk about self-restraint, but when it means[Pg 107] letting things go to the dogs, and maybe putting your vessel in danger—" He thrust his fid between the strands of his rope with an energy that seemed to him adequately to complete his meaning.

Drew was dimly aware that the situation had somehow become charged with feeling, and remained silent; but Hetty, with clearer instinct, recognized the cause of Medbury's heat, and resented it, while she recognized its potential force, feeling that she had unwittingly been drawn from the calm current of broad discussion into an inner vortex of personal emotion. That she had become unduly interested in Drew—she clearly saw that the thought was in Medbury's mind—she indignantly denied to herself. She turned toward the sailor with resentment shining in her eyes; but at the sight of his head bowed above his work, there flashed over her a strange revulsion of feeling. It was not tenderness, though compounded of[Pg 108] tenderness, pity, and the memory of many things. His loyalty to her, which had lived on through long years in spite of varying encouragement, had sometimes provoked her vexation, sometimes her complacency; at this moment it suddenly appeared to her to be a beautiful thing. His hair waved a little about his brows; his face, though sad, showed the old fine courage. She saw his close-shut lips held nothing of harshness. His hands, brown and sinewy, revealed strength and skill, and were as yet uncoarsened by hard contact with hemp and canvas in cold and wet and sun. "After all, he's a man," she thought, with tears welling in her eyes.

She turned and looked out across the shining sea, feeling its immensity, its power in the moving waves, to be somehow strangely like the life that inclosed her and swept her on without the power of volition. She did not turn as Drew spoke.

From time to time in the last few days he had read aloud from the "Idylls of the King" while she worked at some trifle, or sat with hands clasped in her lap and watched the waves in a pleasurable emotion to which his fine, unaffected voice had contributed quite as largely as the words of the poet. At this moment his question, in its abrupt withdrawal from the general interest, seemed tactless. For an instant she made no answer.

"No, not now," she said at last. "Just at present it seems too unreal, too far away, to move me. I don't believe I am an imaginative person; life appeals to me too strongly."

She had turned to watch Medbury's work while she was yet speaking, and Drew, lingering a moment, had gone away with the impression of dismissal. This she felt, and was troubled by it, and vexed at finding herself[Pg 110] troubled. Her vexation had the effect of bringing her nearer in spirit to Medbury.

"Want to try?" he asked, and jumped to his feet. "I'll get a piece of manila and teach you."

He threw down a coil of running rigging for a seat for her, and together they laughingly began the lesson.

"I always envied the things boys did," she said. "I know how I used to watch them, but was too afraid of being called a tomboy ever to attempt anything. It's hard to be ambitious and sensitive, too."

"I know you could run when you were a child," he said, smiling. "Do you remember the time you snatched my hat and I did not catch you till you got to Martha Parsons's gate? Then you turned and looked so serious that I did not dare to take it."

[Pg 111]"Yes," she answered, with a laugh. "And I remember how frightened I was when you followed me. I thought I had done the boldest thing. And when we stopped and just looked at each other I was sure that you thought so, too. Finally I said, 'Here's your hat,' and you said, 'Oh,' and took it. I don't remember now how it ended."

"I do," he said promptly. "I took it and went away; afterward I went back, but you had gone. Then I thought of all the things I ought to have said and done when it was too late."

"Well, it was silly enough," she said, dismissing the subject. "I don't know what made me do it."

He had unlaid the strands of the rope while they talked, and now, placing it in her hand, he showed her how to make a bight with one strand and pass a second around the first, and a third around the[Pg 112] second, and up through the bight of the first, forming the wall.

"It is hard," she said after a moment more. "It looked simple enough while you were doing it." She held the rope in her hand and looked at him in smiling despair. "I shall never learn."

"Yes; now run the end—no, this end—through the bight. That's right; now pull[Pg 113] it taut. You haven't answered my question, Hetty."

[Pg 115]"You haven't asked any," she replied quickly; and then added: "What next?"

"Pull it tighter," he answered, and, leaning forward, drew it taut, for an instant covering her hands with his own.

"No; I cannot even try." She looked about her with restless eyes. Something in her face stirred his foreboding.

"Oh, I mean nothing," she cried impatiently. "I wish the sea would go down. It's dreadful."

She sprang to her feet, and, moving to the rigging, leaned against the sheer-pole and watched the blue sea rise almost to the[Pg 116] line of the deck, then fall away with appalling swiftness. Medbury followed her there.

"Why don't you whistle for a wind?" she asked him. "Why don't you? I think I'll go below until you do."

"Isn't it pleasanter here?" he said. "You would call it a beautiful day at home."

"Yes, I should," she acknowledged. "It seems like April—April at home. I can shut my eyes"—she shut them—"and see just how it looks: the big willow by our gate growing green in a night, and the grass, and the sunlight on everything—or rain; only the rain makes the grass greener, and you don't mind it at all in spring, as you do at other times."

He had watched her while she stood with eyes closed, but when she opened them suddenly and looked at him with a smile, he turned away in confusion, as if he had been[Pg 117] caught watching her when he knew she would not care to be seen.

"That's the way your face always looks to me," he said, with the boldness of embarrassment.

"What do you mean?" she asked. Her lips parted as if to smile, but closed again in a neutral line that was neither smile nor frown, but might easily become either when she had heard his explanation.

"Like April—your face is like that. It's always changing. I like it always, but best when you smile, of course."

"I cannot smile at a speech like that," she said primly, and turned a serious face from him.

For five minutes he kept his eyes turned from her, and then looked to see if her April face had changed again. It had not, and a sigh escaped him.

At the sigh her face had become severe, but almost immediately he saw her lips[Pg 118] twitch, close firmly together, then part in a laugh.

"Oh, Tom, you're ridiculous!" she cried, and struggled against her laughter. But her face became serious again at once, and she added: "I do not like such speeches. They sound silly."

Captain March's keen eyes, as he walked the deck, looking aloft, saw a slightly frayed spot in the maintopsail-halyard. Crossing the deck, he stopped by the side of his mate.

"Looks as if that halyard wouldn't stand much strain," he said. "Better look at it before long, Mr. Medbury." He pointed to the place as Medbury looked up.

"Hawkins never did look after the little things," the captain went on, with gentle[Pg 119] grumbling. "Good man, but didn't seem to have any eyes sometimes. Still, I was sorry to have him go ashore sick. He can't afford to lay idle long. Same with John Davis. I thought he'd jump at the chance to take Hawkins's place. I didn't think it so strange in Bob Markham's backing out: he'd promised his wife to stay ashore. But Davis—I don't understand about him. I never knew folks to act so. Davis seemed pleased when I asked him, and hurried right off to get his things; but before I'd hardly turned my head, back he galloped and said he'd changed his mind. It made me a little provoked; and when I asked him why, he just winked. Well!" He walked away, still grumbling.

Medbury had not lifted his eyes from his work as the captain had talked, but now he glanced up, to find Hetty's eyes watching him keenly. Something in the intensity of her look stirred his foreboding. He was not wholly unacquainted with the intuitive divination[Pg 120] with which women often flash upon the secrets men would withhold from them, and now he braced himself for the question that he knew was coming.

"You needn't tell me," she cried with suppressed passion. "I know. I know you got them to. They'd do it for you. You seem to have obliging friends. Oh!" She turned away, but came back immediately. "And now I suppose everybody in Blackwater is laughing over the story. And laughing at me! I didn't want you to come; but if I'd known this, do you think I would have set foot on this vessel while you were aboard?[Pg 121] I'd have died first." She walked to the rail, but came restlessly back. "Well, it's over now. Do you think I could go back home and have people know that your—your trick had succeeded? There have been times when I have thought that I could care for you in the way you wish, but I couldn't be sure. If my face is like April, as you say, I think my mind is, too. I cannot be sure. Sometimes I think I do not care for anything; I think I have no heart. And then, when I see you watching me, and I know what you are thinking, I almost hate you, and want to go away from everything I've ever known. But now, after this, it is ended. Oh, you make me ashamed!"

He had heard her in a tumult of contending emotions—shame and sorrow for hurting her, pity, remorse. Heart-sick, he rose to his feet.

"I didn't mean to hurt you, Hetty. Good Lord! you know that! You must know it!"[Pg 122] he exclaimed. "And no one will know. You needn't care."

"You are a hard woman," he said, in a sudden letting-go of all self-control—"a hard and heartless woman."

"I wish you wouldn't," she whispered passionately—"wouldn't speak to me. You hurt me."

He did not understand, and his face hardened, and his eyes grew hot with impotent anger. It was as if all the conventions had dropped away from him, and he had become the primitive man. He could crush her with one hand, he blindly told himself; yet she mocked him and his strength. All his life he had loved her, followed her in devoted service, but to what end? To be shunned,[Pg 123] eluded, mocked, and scorned. He gripped his hands tightly together in his revolt against his enforced inaction because she was weak and a woman. But for once he would speak.

"You've hurt me for many a long year," he answered hotly, "but you'll hurt me no more." With that he walked away as Cromwell must have gone from the Long Parliament.

Medbury descended to his room, opened the lid of his desk, and fumbled about aimlessly with hands that trembled; then, as if he had found what he had been looking for, he lowered the lid, and, leaning his elbows upon it, stood looking moodily before him. He told himself that he was glad it was over; anything was better than the long uncertainty that had held him bound in chains for years. But no one should know that he cared, and he glanced at the little hand-glass under his window to see if his face had changed. It cheered him to note no difference since morning, and, with boyish affectation, he smiled at his image in the glass. But suddenly, as if to test his strength,[Pg 125] his mind flashed the image of Hetty before him—her face turned up to him smilingly, as he had often seen it, her eyes, every feature. With a groan he dropped his head upon his arms.

He put the mood away from him sternly, and began to debate with himself whether it would be better to keep on loving her all his days, going to his grave a sad and lonely man, or gaily to turn to another at once, to show how little he cared. He came to no decision because he could not determine which course would hurt her more.

It was his watch below, but he could not sleep, so taking his log-book, pen, and ink out into the cabin, he sat down at the table, though it was neither the time nor the place for writing up his log.

Mrs. March was there alone, and, saying that he could not write at his desk, Medbury opened his book.

He wrote down the date, saw that he had[Pg 126] written that of two days before, so scratched it out, and replaced it with the correct one, and slowly began to write "Dead calm" in bold letters up and down the column for winds.

"There's no telling. Wind's an uncertain thing; nothing more so," he replied, and dipped his pen into the ink, squared his shoulders, and made the down stroke of the first letter of a new word with a care for details that seemed to indicate that he had left the subject of winds irrevocably behind, and then added, "except women."

Mrs. March had thought the sentence finished, and had taken up her knitting again. Now she merely nodded.

"It's true," she said impartially. "Most women wouldn't know their own minds if they were to come upon them in broad daylight.[Pg 127] They are like men in that." She shot an amused glance toward the young man.

"You know them," he said bitterly, ignoring her last sentence, and secretly disappointed at such ready acquiescence, which indicated, he feared, a jocular state of mind.

"You mean I don't know them," corrected Mrs. March. "No one does. Do you suppose I know my own daughter's? No more than she does herself. I suppose you were thinking of her, weren't you?"

"It's all over," he answered, and laid down his pen, but continued to make motions across the page with his finger.

Mrs. March showed no surprise, but she ceased knitting, apparently out of respect for the young man's feelings.

"She just told me so," replied Medbury, glad that he could at last unburden himself. "She said she sometimes thought she had no heart. She told me that there were times[Pg 128] when she had thought that she might care for me, but now she knew her own mind. So it's all over."

"Know her own mind! Fiddlesticks!" exclaimed Mrs. March, and proceeded to knit again. "I guess you've pestered her in some way, and so she said, 'Now I'll decide.' I suppose you've told her often enough that you couldn't live without her, and should always feel that way. It's perfectly natural for a girl to want to see if you can't."

"I couldn't go so far as to say that. It may be just pretense, and it may be the plain truth, and it may be she doesn't know. You can't tell. You've got to wait and see."

"Well," he replied gloomily, "I guess it's all over." He was not going to be so weak, he told himself, as to begin to hope again.

[Pg 129]"I've always thought it would come out right in the end," continued Mrs. March. "You know I don't feel like Cap'n March. I've always said, 'Let the young folks settle it for themselves'; and I've always liked you, Tom. But you've always been too humble, and she's been too certain of you. I kind o' thought, when you took things in your own hands and came this trip, it was the best thing you could have done. A girl likes a masterful man."

"Then I guess she was afraid of herself," said Mrs. March, with conviction. "She was afraid she'd have to give in."

"Because a girl's love is a funny thing. There's fear in it, and pretense, and bashfulness,[Pg 130] and coldness, and all the craziest things under the sun."

"She's known me so long, and known how I felt, sometimes it seems to me that maybe it's grown tiresome to her. A man like Drew, now, who hasn't known her long—if he cared—" He hesitated.

The cabin door opened, and they heard Hetty's laugh near. It had the peculiarly resonant quality of a voice on deck in a calm, heard by one below. It also sounded happy. Medbury slipped away to his room.

The last words Mrs. March had spoken were in his mind, and he put his book away in bitterness of spirit. He heard Hetty descend into the cabin, speak to her mother, and then pass his door, going up the forward companionway. A sudden wild impulse to[Pg 131] be aggressive seized him, and, leaving his room, he, too, ascended to the deck.

She was standing outside the cabin door, and she turned and smiled as he drew near.

He did not even look at her, but, hurrying to the booby-hatch, threw open the sliding hood and descended.

"Now I've done it," he said, as he seated himself upon a coiled hawser. "What a fool I can be when I really put my mind to it!"

But even with this repulse of her he was not satisfied; he wondered why he had not at least looked at her with scorn, and he thought of several bitter speeches that would have been better than silence.

Mrs. march sat in a steamer-chair wedged in between the side of the cabin and the lounge, the captain was smoking, and Drew held his book unopened in his hand, when Hetty went below later in the morning.

"Well, I'm glad to see you," said Mrs. March. "I don't see how you keep from tumbling overboard, we roll so. Why don't your father stop it,—pour oil on the water, or something,—if he's such a good sailor? But he only smokes. He doesn't even tell us how much worse it was on some other trip. I thought sailors always did that. I'm sure they talk of nothing else ashore. Just hear those dishes rattle!"

[Pg 133]"If you'd only go up on deck, mother," Hetty advised, "you'd not mind it so much. It doesn't seem so bad there. It's a beautiful day."

"No," her mother answered; "I'll stay here. You know how a pussy-cat will crouch down and shut her eyes when you go to box her ears; well, I'm like that. I don't want to see what's coming; I know well enough."

"I don't know's you've ever met Billy," he said; "but he's one of our Blackwater folks. He's been going to sea a good many years, but he's never got beyond the galley. Five or six years ago he went out as steward with Cap'n Dave Barker on the old Maggie P. Monroe, and off Cape Fear one night they[Pg 134] struck a pretty lively southeaster, and for a time it looked pretty dubious. Cap'n Dave is kind of excitable in bad weather, and he got to raving up and down the deck and declaring they were all going to kingdom come before morning, and everybody was pretty well scared. Well, Cap'n Dave's a good deal better sailor than he is prophesier, and, the gale going down before daybreak, they all felt pretty good, but tired out from being on deck all night, and sharp-set for breakfast. Well, seven bells came, but no signs of Billy, so Cap'n Dave sent the mate forward to stir him up. He found the galley closed, with no sign of fire inside, and Billy fast asleep in his bunk just off the galley. The mate picked up a dish-pan and banged it up against the boarding right by Billy's head, expecting to see him jump straight through the deck. All he did was to turn over slowly and look at the mate. The mate said he didn't even blink. Well, he used some pretty strong[Pg 135] language, and Billy tumbled out and began to hustle around. He said Cap'n Dave was so certain they were going to the bottom before morning, that it seemed a pity wasting time and strength to wind his clock and set the alarm, so he just tumbled in, thinking he might as well be comfortable and get a good night's sleep, if it was going to be his last. Then he turned to the mate—he was raking out his stove—and, grinning sheepishly, said: 'Mr. Thompson, I thought you was the angel Gabriel when you started all that racket, blest if I didn't!' Cap'n Dave asked him afterward if he was disappointed when he saw the mate standing over him instead of what he'd expected. Billy thought a minute, and then said: 'Well, cap'n, if you'd kind o' set your mind on seeing a first-class show performance, and then after you'd paid for your seat and was good and ready, if the curtain should go up, and, lo and behold! there wasn't nothing there but[Pg 136] just Sam Thompson, what would you 'a' been?'"

Mrs. March laughed with the rest, and, leaning forward, touched her daughter's arm.

"Don't you remember the winter Billy's wife got religion?" she asked. "I don't know about telling a minister that; he might think that Blackwater was pretty stony soil. You see,"—she turned to Drew,—"the vessel Billy was in was long overdue, and folks were getting uneasy about her. There was a big revival that winter, and Billy's wife got to coming every night and going forward to the mourners' bench; and, first and last, a good many prayers were offered for her husband. Well, when everybody had about given him up, the vessel got in, with Billy safe and sound. That was the end of Maria's church-going. Finally the minister went around to find out why she had lost all her interest, and she told him. 'Mr. Snow,' she said, 'Billy wasn't in a bit of danger all[Pg 137] the time we was a-praying for him. He said they didn't have wind enough to blow the smoke away from his galley stovepipe, and what we ought to have done was to pray for a gale of wind. That kind o' made me lose all faith in the deficiency of prayer.'"

"I suppose she thought that the good Lord could look out for folks at sea a good deal better than those who didn't know the circumstances," commented Captain March. "That doesn't sound unreasonable." His eyes twinkled as he looked at the minister.

"I fear there are many that have very queer notions about prayer," said Drew, smiling. "Once I heard a man pray: 'O Lord, keep us from burning the candle of life at both ends, and snuffing the ashes in thy face!' It was a little startling."

"It does sound a little familiar," admitted Mrs. March. "It's funny how free we can be with the Lord in our prayers, when, if we stood face to face with him, we wouldn't dare[Pg 138] whisper a word or lift our eyes. I think a good many of us, if we ever do get to heaven, will feel more like hiding our faces than rejoicing when we think of some of the things we've prayed for. But maybe such people won't get there, after all." She spoke with so great an air of relief that the others laughed.

"Well, I don't think it's the place for folks who don't feel as though they are going to enjoy every bit of it, do you?" Mrs. March replied.

"Mother," she said, "aren't you afraid Mr. Drew will think you speak too lightly of sacred things? He doesn't know you as we do."

"Don't think me so narrow, please," Drew protested, smiling. "I hope I can distinguish[Pg 139] between perfect frankness of character and irreverence."

Mrs. March looked from one to the other in silence, a trifle awed at the thought of herself in the rôle of blasphemer. Her confusion was only momentary, however.

"Did I say anything very dreadful, my dear?" she asked. "I didn't know it. I don't like moping here, and if I'm going to like it hereafter, I shall be a good deal changed, that's all. And if I'm going to be so much changed as not to be myself, I don't see what satisfaction it's going to be. I might as well be like foolish Susan Burtis, and have no character at all."

The others laughed, but Hetty scarcely heard her. She sat where she could see through the narrow windows the line of sea and sky as the brig rolled to port; then it flew up, and the bright sunlight flashed across her face and along the floor of the cabin. Turning at last, her eyes met Drew's.

"Not yet," she told him; then she turned to her father. "Isn't the wind ever going to come again?" she asked.

"Well," replied Captain March, "it brought us here, and I guess it'll carry us away. It generally does."

"It doesn't consider us, my dear," he replied. Then he rose slowly and went up the companionway, and a moment later they heard him whistling for a wind.

"Father must see something—a catspaw at least," she exclaimed. "I'm going to find[Pg 141] out." With that she, too, sought the deck, followed by Drew.

[Pg 143]Captain March stood sweeping the sea with his glass; but as they approached him he lowered it, and went silently below.

"There isn't one—not one," said Hetty, as she looked about for the dark streaks of catspaws. Three great rollers came sweeping in, and they rocked and pitched with the might of them. The girl caught at the rail for support. "It makes one think of the words, 'Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,' doesn't it?" she said solemnly.

"It makes me feel humble, but useless, and I do not care to feel like that," she said. "I want to be doing things. Doesn't life seem barren to you here?"

"No," he replied. "Life means just as much as we put into it, I fancy, and these days[Pg 144] have meant much for me. I should not care to have them blotted out."

She had turned abruptly just as they rolled down on a long swell, and, stumbling against the bitts, with a gasp fell outboard across the low rail.

Drew leaped toward her just in time. His hand, flashing out, caught her as she was slipping from the rail, and brought her back against his breast. For an instant he held her there.

"Don't! for pity's sake, don't!" she whispered, and, pulling herself free, sank upon the bitts, put her hands to her face, and laughed hysterically. In a moment she looked up.

"Don't tell them," she said. "I should not like to have them know I fell." Then she walked unsteadily toward the cabin door. Half-way there, she looked back. "I ought[Pg 145] to thank you," she said, in a low voice, "and I do." And with that she disappeared.

Medbury, overhauling a spare sail on the main-deck, had not seen it, but the sailor with him had, and his exclamation had made Medbury turn quickly, only to see Hetty standing with Drew's arm about her. He stooped to his work again with shaking fingers; but the sailor stood still, staring.

"Here!" he said savagely, and the sailor turned to his task again without a word.

The day dragged interminably. Hetty remained steadily in her room; through his watches on deck Medbury drove the men from one task to another with a feverish harshness wholly unusual, and which brought his watch to the forecastle at the end of the day in heated and profane weariness. Drew spent the time on deck with a book, sometimes read with slight comprehension, but more often[Pg 146] closed over his finger, while he watched the gleaming whiteness of the sea, seeing now a school of flying-fish run like flashes of quicksilver through the long arcs of their flight, and now the dorsal fin of a shark, like an inverted ploughshare, cut the surface of the barren glebe. Even Captain March's imperturbability became less rocklike. Once he paused at Drew's side with a grumbling sound that was clearly a sigh.

"Well, it's 'Paddy's hurricane,' and no mistake," he said. "I never saw anything like it. Usually there's a little air stirring somewhere about. You'd think that something queer had got into things, wouldn't you?"

He had been standing balancing himself easily to the swing of the deck, but there came a vicious lunge, which stopped suddenly, as if arrested by a great hand, and he went staggering down the slope with swaying arms, like a collapsing sprinter. When he brought[Pg 147] up against the rail, he talked on in a level voice that recognized no interruption:

"It's queer about a calm: there's noise enough in it if a sea's running, and it gets on your nerves; but when the wind blows again, you feel as if you'd just come out of an air-tight room, and the sound of the wind makes you want to shout. There's Mr. Medbury, now; he's been nagging the men all the afternoon as if he was afraid without the sound of his voice, like a boy whistling on a dark road. It's ridiculous in a grown man, but it's natural enough."

Drew flushed, but made no reply. He, too, had been thinking of Medbury, but his thoughts were not enviable. He had been false to a man who had trusted him, he told himself, and he had shown feeling that he had no moral right to show. It was in vain that he tried to convince himself that his right to Hetty was as great as Medbury's own; in his heart he felt that it was not.[Pg 148] And what of the girl? he asked himself, in growing remorse. After his action of the morning, could he again meet her on the old footing of friendly fellowship? He could not go on, but how could he now draw back? In any way that he looked, he could see nothing but his moral cowardice.

In a mental restlessness that he could not allay, he rose to his feet and walked forward to the break in the deck. The sun, a copper-colored ball, was nearing the horizon, and Medbury and his men were gathering up the sail that they had been patching; one of the crew was sweeping up the deck. The querulous complaining of Medbury's voice floated aft, the human undertone in the jangling noises of disturbed nature.

For a moment Drew watched the scene before him, and then descending the steps and, hurrying across the plank that was blocked high above the water that swashed across the deck from scupper to scupper, he stopped at[Pg 149] the galley door. The steward looked up gloomily, but, seeing Drew, showed his gleaming teeth in a perfunctory smile that had none of its usual geniality. Through the high slide in the partition between the galley and the forecastle Drew could hear the watch trooping in with angry mutterings against the mate.

"Yo' heah dat?" he said. "Dese heah cahms trouble-breedehs faw shuah. Ole mahn Satan done chase dat buckra mate's soul roun' de stump all eb'nin'. Two, t'ree bad mahns aboa'd dis hookeh, en two, t'ree cowahds. Dose cowahds been da worse—some dahk night. Dat buckra mate betteh watch out." He laughed.

Drew stirred uneasily. The threats of the crew and the scarcely understood warning of the West Indian steward had to his mind something of the character of a Greek tragic[Pg 150] chorus foretelling doom, and presently he moved away out of hearing, not caring to have even negatively any part in the moving finger of Fate.

He wandered about aimlessly for a while, dreading to approach Medbury, who, now that his work was done, stood near the main-rigging with his pipe in his mouth, his spirit for the moment at peace. Drew had little knowledge of sailors, but he was sufficiently a man of the world to know that the irrepressible threats of the forecastle meant little. Still, the steward had hinted at danger, and, yielding to the other's better knowledge of his little world, Drew finally went aft to warn the mate.

Medbury looked up sharply as Drew approached, but turned his eyes away immediately. In the silence that followed neither stirred, but, resting their arms upon the sheer-pole, each seemed absorbed in the cloudless panorama of the closing day.

[Pg 151]The sun sank lower and lower; one by one the crew came out of the forecastle, and, dipping up buckets of water, sluiced themselves with the noisy abandon of water-spaniels. The pungent scent of tobacco floated aft, and now the sound of a laugh, or the scuffle of feet upon the deck. From the galley came the soft, slurred speech of the steward, lifted high in a quick exchange of wit with his forecastle neighbors, and followed by the almost continuous flood of his unrestrained cachinnation. Clearly the day was ending in peace.

This peacefulness, so at variance with the scarcely restrained passion that, a moment before, had sent him aft to warn Medbury of danger, left Drew strangely bewildered. He turned to his companion, and with a smile said:

"Do you know, a moment ago I thought that the crew was on the verge of mutiny; now I feel as if I had been dreaming. I don't[Pg 152] understand it. They are like care-free children now. I can't believe they are such consummate actors."

"I was at the galley door and heard them making threats. The steward seemed to think there was danger—to you," Drew answered. "I thought I ought to warn you; but now it seems silly."

"A sailorman's threat doesn't mean anything," Medbury told him, "and prophesying evil is the 'doctor's' trade. He's a big voodoo out home in Santa Cruz, and half the negroes on the island will go five miles out of their way to avoid him."

"Well, my crisis was only a mare's nest, it seems. I was beginning to think it was to be a day of adventures. One seemed enough."

"Yes; Miss March fell across the rail. I caught her just in time. I thought you saw."

"You haven't anything to explain to me. I'm the mate of this vessel; nothing more. That's all the interest I've got here, and all I want."

With that he walked away. He knew it was childish, but, having let himself go, he was no longer able to exercise his self-restraint till the whole madness had passed.

As Captain March went up the companionway after supper, he thought he felt a puff of air across his face. Stepping out upon the deck, his eyes instinctively turned to the northeast, from which direction he expected the wind. A dove-colored light still shone in the eastern sky; below it the sea was a darker color, irradiated by the glowing west.

"Isn't that a catspaw?" she asked, and pointed northward, where a dark film of purple seemed to roughen the long slope of a swell that shone like pink satin. Even as they looked, the slope became a shallow bowl, and[Pg 155] the patch of purple faded to the uniform gray of the hollowed wave.

This was as wide a departure from the placid philosophy with which he looked upon life as he ever gave expression to; and his daughter and his mate, who knew him equally well, recognized in it the extent of his mental disturbance. To them both the prolonged calm, in the changing twilight, took on an aspect of uncanniness. It was as if they stood absolutely alone, the last of living things, in a chaos of dead waters, under the sweeping throng of stars, which saw not and heeded not the blotting out of their small world. Tacitly both had agreed to give no sign of their changed relations so long as they were compelled to meet daily.

Medbury slipped away forward for a turn about the deck. He looked at the lights to see if they were in order.

[Pg 156]"They might as well be kept burning," he muttered, "though God knows what good they are."

Back on the quarter-deck, when he returned from his round, he found the others leaning over the rail in silence. It had suddenly grown dark, and a haze had come up, obscuring the stars and the sea. He paused near Hetty, who looked up, smiled, and made room for him.

"We thought we heard the beat of a steamer's paddle just now," she said. "Listen!"

He leaned over the rail beside her, but for a long time heard nothing but the whine of spars, the rattle of the main-sheet blocks as the boom swung them taut, and the jump of the wheel in its becket. At intervals there came the sound of water dripping from the channels or spouting from the scuppers. These sounds seemed to make more acute the silence of the sea, which seemed like a living,[Pg 157] threatening presence. At last Medbury stood up.

"Listen!" said Hetty, in a low voice, and again he dropped his elbows to the rail.

Suddenly there came a quick succession of muffled throbs, like the far-off churning sound of a steamer's paddle-wheel; then it ceased as absolutely as if a door had been closed noiselessly upon it.

"It's queer," said Medbury. "There wasn't a sign of a steamer in sight at sunset. She must be far away, and we hear her only when we're both on the top of a swell. Sound carries a long way on a night like this."

Medbury brought them, and the captain[Pg 158] slowly swept the horizon; then he crossed the deck and walked to the main-rigging. Coming back, he handed the glasses to Medbury.

In five minutes the mate came back, and went up the main-rigging to the crosstrees. When he descended, he came aft.

"Better get your fog-horn forward," said the captain, and took the glasses for another look as Medbury went below. A moment later the mate returned to the deck with the long box of the patent fog-horn, and presently the dreary wail began to sound at intervals from the forecastle-deck. Hetty shivered as she heard it.

"It frightens me!" she murmured, with a little catch in her voice. "It frightens me!"

The crew were at the rail forward, silent and listening. The fog had blotted out the[Pg 159] fore part of the vessel, but the forecastle door was open, and the swinging lamp was like an orange center of light in a nebulous haze. Once a sailor passed before it, and his shape loomed black and huge against the luminous interior. At short intervals the fog-horn sounded like a wailing banshee through the darkness; but there was no answering signal: only at long intervals came that strange, throbbing beat, like an uncanny chuckle, but seemingly neither nearer nor farther away than at first. Hardly two aboard agreed as to its direction, for the opaque walls of fog deflect sound-waves at sea, as a crystal breaks a ray of light.

"Two years ago," he began slowly, with the hesitation of a man who feels moved to confidence against his better judgment, "we were running up the straits to Singapore, when it suddenly came on thick. We were[Pg 160] close-hauled and had just about wind enough for steerageway, and we had the fog-horn going and were keeping a sharp lookout, for we were right in the track of shipping, and you know how vessels drift together in a fog, no matter which way they were heading before it thickened up. Well, we hadn't heard a peep all day, and toward night it seemed to be lifting a little, when I heard the man at the wheel give a little cry, and, looking astern, there, not a cable's length away, was a dingy, raveled-out, full-rigged Portuguese brig slipping right across our wake. They hadn't made a sound, and they didn't even then, though our old man got black in the face with cursing them for their sins. There was a black-whiskered old fellow, with his coat-collar turned up about his ears, at the wheel; but he scarcely looked our direction: only once he wagged his beard at us, and threw one arm over his head in a funny way, and then squinted aloft again, paying no more[Pg 161] attention to us than if we'd been so much seaweed. But just forward the fore-rigging there was a row of sailormen leaning over the rail, and their eyes followed us like a lot of beady birds' eyes till the fog swallowed them up again. Well, the day after we reached Singapore the old man came aboard in a brown study. He said he'd heard ashore that there'd been a lot of dirty weather knocking about the straits, and a Portuguese brig called the Villa Real was forty days overdue. Well, she stayed overdue, and not a splinter or spun-yarn of her ever came ashore." He paused a moment to relight his pipe, and then added: "On the stern of the Portuguese brig that we had seen, in big white letters a foot high, was the name Villa Real."

In the silence that followed some one forward gave a low laugh; in the fog it sounded strange and unnatural.

"Did you ever hear a loon cry alongshore[Pg 162] at night?" asked Medbury. For the first time on the voyage he had become actually loquacious. "I used to hear them at home when I was a boy. It's a creepy sound, and makes a man feel lonesome and homesick." He paused, as if half-ashamed of the confession, but went on, with a boyish chuckle: "Somehow, that fellow's laugh made me think of it, though I can't say it sounded like a loon, either. It's queer how one thing'll suggest another that isn't at all like it."

"Knocking about in fog and storm, without sleep, a sailor gets queer notions in his head at times," said Captain March, slowly. "Now I had a little experience once that seemed queer at the time, though I suppose it was natural enough, if you only knew how to explain it. You know what queer shapes will[Pg 163] sometimes loom up at night; but walk right up to 'em and you find it's nothing but a stump or a white post or something. Well, the first vessel I ever had was the schooner Sarah J. Mason. I was pretty young at the time, and I guess I was a bit nervous, but it does seem yet as if that first voyage as master was the roughest I've ever had. I had chartered for Para, and we struck dirty weather almost from the first. About eight days out the wind came out ahead, light and baffling, and I got her topsails on for the first time. But along after sundown it freshened up again, and I took 'em in. A young fellow from up the State somewhere had stowed the maintopsail, and someway, I don't know how,—I guess he was hurrying and a little careless; it was his watch below,—he slipped. For years after that, when I wasn't feeling first-rate, I used to wake up with a start, thinking I heard his yell again. Well, it wasn't very rough, and we got a boat over,[Pg 164] but it wasn't any use. He must have gone down like a stone. After that it was dirty weather, with scarcely a glimpse of the sun, all the way out. I was upset and worn out, I guess; but one night, looking aloft, I saw some one on the main-crosstrees. There was a good-sized moon, though the sky was overcast, but light enough to see pretty distinctly. 'Who's that aloft?' says I to the second mate. He didn't answer much of anything, but walked to the rail and looked up. 'Well, call him down,' I said sharply, and he went to the rigging, and, standing on the rail, yelled: 'Who's that up there?' Then he went half-way up and stopped. I guess he stood there five minutes before he came down and went forward. In a minute he came back, looking pretty white. 'Everybody accounted for, sir,' he said, and his teeth were chattering as if he had the ague.

"Now, it sounds funny, but I never looked aloft at night on that trip without wishing[Pg 165] I didn't have to, and there wasn't a sailorman aboard who could have been driven to go up to that masthead after dark if he'd been killed for refusing. We had fair weather coming home, and we carried that topsail till we blew it off her one night. I was plagued glad to see it go."

"Talking about explaining things if you only walk right up to them," said Medbury—"now there 're some things you can't explain. Take the old Martha Hunter, for instance. How are you going to explain her?" He leaned forward and addressed his talk to Drew, who knew nothing of the Martha Hunter. "She was built in Blackwater when I was a boy," he went on, "and before her ribs were all up Jerry Bartow fell from the scaffolding and was killed, and Tom Martin nearly cut his foot off with an adze while he was trimming a stick of timber that went into her. It went in with the stain of his blood on it, and it wasn't the last stain of the kind[Pg 166] that she carried before she was through. Oh, she was greedy for that sort of thing! When she was launched she must have got the notion that she was designed to dig out a new channel in the harbor, for she fetched bottom and carried away her rudder; and before the year was out she came off the Boston mud-banks so badly hogged that she looked as if she'd got her sheer on upside down. It wasn't long before a sailorman fell from aloft and was killed on her deck; and the very next trip, in warping her out of her berth in Wareham, the hawser parted and broke the leg of the man who was holding turn at the capstan. Cap'n Silas Hawkins brought her home to overhaul, and the very first day he walked down the main-hatchway and was killed. Why, she used to drag ashore in any sort of a white-ash breeze; and if there was any dirty weather knocking about, she always managed to run her nose into it, and would come limping home like a disreputable old girl out on a[Pg 167] lark. You could have filled a book with the stories of the men she lost or maimed, and the trouble she got into first and last. But she was fortunate in a way, too, for she made money, and you couldn't lose her. I guess she's running yet."

"I saw her a year ago last fall," said Captain March. "I haven't heard anything startling about her since, so I guess she's going."

"Well," said Medbury, "how are you going to explain her, and others like her? I'm not superstitious, or any more so than the common run of folks; but things like that—" He shrugged his shoulders and laughed, then, dropping his elbows to the rail again, turned to listen.

For a long time they had not noticed the sound that puzzled them, and now, in the silence, they remembered it again, and strained their ears to catch it once more. The fog-horn boomed out at regular intervals;[Pg 168] only the noises of the rolling brig were also heard.

While they still stood listening, all at once Medbury thought he felt a puff of wind. Yet it was not so much wind as it was a suggestion of wind: it seemed to him that a hand, wet and cold, had been thrust close to his face and then withdrawn. He could not explain the chill that seemed to run through his frame. Then he shook off the feeling, and turned to Captain March.

"No," replied the captain. "If we get a stir of air, I'll put the canvas on her. I don't want to slat the sails all to pieces, but if we get enough for steerageway, we'll try it. I don't like loafing about in a fog like this with my hands in my pockets."

Then, even while he was speaking, out of the darkness and the fog and the subdued murmurs of the ocean, without other warning[Pg 169] than the intangible beat that had mystified them, a long roller came sweeping in, lifted them in its mighty arms, slipped past, and dropped them with a shock that shook the brig, and forced a cry from the lips of every soul aboard.

The group on the quarter-deck staggered together in a huddled bunch, then fell apart as Medbury and the captain slipped out and ran forward. Then the brig rose on another swell, and came up bumping, with a snarling sound along the fore-chains.

"It's some barnacled old derelict," Medbury turned to shout to the captain, who was following him with surprising swiftness, but with short, quick strides, like a waddling duck, and breathing heavily. Medbury was on the rail, peering over into the darkness, when the captain reached the fore-rigging. A group of sailors huddled about the rail.

"Here, you," called Captain March, "get fenders quick! Bring that spare royal-yard[Pg 171]—anything!" Then he lifted himself into the rigging by Medbury's side. The next minute he was calling for a lantern and the flare.

They quickly had the yard and some planks lashed over the side, though they knew that such protections were almost futile in the lift of the swell that was then running. Under the light of the flare, gray and almost invisible in the thick night, awash at one moment, at the next showing a jagged line of railless stanchions, they saw the derelict lying almost parallel with them. With the flare in his hand, Medbury lowered himself down to the channel, looking for the place of contact. Forward of the chains the side of the brig was badly scraped, and a part of the channel was splintered; but they could see no other injury.

"She may yet," replied the captain. He[Pg 172] straightened up, and held his hand above his head. There was not a breath of air stirring. He turned to the mate again. "Get a boat over the side quick, Mr. Medbury," he said; "we've got to pull out of this."

They swung the boat off the center-house, and with difficulty, in the heavy swell, got her over the side and away, with Medbury and five of the men as her crew. A line was paid out to them, and run through a forward chock and passed about the capstan. Standing by the port cathead, Captain March "held turn."

"Don't know what may happen," he said aloud to himself. "I'd better keep a hold o' this in this swell." He sent a man up to the top with a lantern, and the second mate to the wheel. "Straight ahead, now!" he roared to the boat. "We don't want to swing her counter over it. Straight ahead, now, you!"

He could hear the thud of the oars in the[Pg 173] rowlocks and their irregular beat on the water, for rowing in the swell was hard; but he could hear, too, the zip! zip! of the line as it tautened, and then the splash as it dropped slack. At times the two hulls came together with a jar, but with no great shock after the first.

Drew had come forward, and once he asked the captain if he could be of assistance. Captain March was leaning over the side, peering into the darkness for the derelict, and had not answered. When he turned to his line again, Drew repeated the question.

"No, no; just keep out of the way," replied the captain, with the impersonal contempt of the sailor for the landsman afloat in times of need.

They drew ahead but slowly; it was only by inches at the best, and there were times when they fell behind as the sweep of the sea caught them and rolled them from side to side through a wide arc. Fortunately,[Pg 174] they were to the leeward of the wreck, and what advantage there was in their greater buoyancy and height above the sea added its little to the feeble efforts of the crew of the boat. Captain March could hear the unsteady ding-donging of the oars in the rowlocks as Medbury urged them on. He peered over the side of the brig with straining eyes.

"It ain't no way to go—like this," once he said aloud. It seemed a trivial end, without the pomp of storm and the exaltation that comes with the last struggle for life. He longed for the struggle for himself, he longed for it for his vessel.

At last there came a time when he could no longer see the derelict, and he grew restive under the uncertainty. All at once he thought he felt a breath of air across his face. He straightened himself, and held his hand up to the wind. It was surely a puff, and, quickly making the line fast, he hurried aft to take the wheel.

[Pg 175]"Get your staysails on her," he told the second mate, as he relieved him. "Set your maintopmast staysail first,—there'll be a steadier air up there,—then get your foretopmast staysail on her." He turned to Drew. "Just bear a hand there, will you?" he said to him.

He heard the staysail run up and the cry of the second mate to belay; then he heard them sheeting it home.

"Not too flat, Mr. Barrett! Not too flat!" he called. "Give her an easy sheet, so she'll lift a little. Now up with the others!"

He saw Hetty's face at the companionway, and glanced at her with half-averted eyes. She was a true sailor's daughter, he thought with pride. He did not object to her presence, for she never worried folks with questions. Then he called to her:

"It's all right, my girl. Don't you worry. Just tell your mother it's all right."

He heard the staysails flap from time to[Pg 176] time, and so began to whistle for a wind. "Deuce take it!" he muttered, "why don't it blow?" Every moment or two he stepped to the rail and peered into the darkness to note his progress. They had slowly drifted away from the wreck, the stern of which now lay opposite the quarter-deck of the brig. The second mate came running aft.

"Shall we brace the yards around, and try to get what canvas we can on her, sir?" he asked.

"No," he answered; "you couldn't do much, short-handed as you are. Maybe we'd just lose control of her. But you go forward and call to Mr. Medbury to keep a-going—keep a-going."

It was a quarter of an hour before the derelict's stern was clearly past the brig's. Slowly the house crept past—a high house, Captain March could now see plainly, and painted white. "Some foreigner," he[Pg 177] thought with scorn, "scared to his boats before he was hurt." He felt all the contempt of his race and kind for timid unseafaring peoples.

Once when the wreck sank deeply in the hollow of the sea, and the swell broke over her, she came up sputtering, and Captain March heard the water gushing from some opening with the rhythmic chug-chug of water gurgling from a bottle.

"That's what we heard," he said aloud. It sounded uncanny even now. "I guess it's a water-butt that's shifted over on its side and the sea washes full," he thought. "Well, it's creepy enough."

Suddenly he gave a start, for from the wreck came the faint, unmistakable crying of a cat. He walked to the rail and listened, muttering to himself: "The scoundrels, to leave her behind!" He stood by the rail for a moment, and presently called: "Kitty! kitty! poor kitty!" Then he went back to[Pg 178] the wheel again, whistling loudly for a wind, that he might not hear the plaintive response to his call.

For a time the situation had worn for Hetty a certain pleasurable aspect of romance; but in the dragging moments that followed the sending away of the boat, her nerves grew tense under the strain, and seemed to present, as it were, sharp edges to the irritating suspense. The low-riding wreck, awash at one moment, at the next looming threateningly above them, showing its jagged outlines uncertainly through the enlarging fog, took on an aspect wholly sinister. With only the desire to get beyond sight of it, she crossed to the starboard main-rigging, and gazed steadily out across the vaporous expanse of the windless sea.

Her resolute refusal to watch the derelict took on, in her mind, something of the character of a senseless game with her fear: she told herself that she would count two hundred[Pg 179] before she looked to see if it were farther away, then five hundred; after that she resolved not to look until she heard a footstep or a voice. The latter task, unrelieved by the mechanically mental exertion of the whispered numbers, became speedily unbearable, and she began to count again. Presently a step sounded on the deck near her. In the tension of the moment she looked up, dangerously near to hysteria.

Her hand was resting against the rigging, and now, as he spoke, in a revulsion of feeling she laid her forehead against it and laughed.

"The whole night has been so unreal—that strange sound, the fog, our ghost talk,[Pg 180] and this danger—" She looked past him in a strange mental relaxation, feeling the inadequacy of words to convey her immeasurable relief.

"It has been hard for you," he said gently. "I thought of you, and wished that I might help you, but I'm a helpless creature here." He smiled.

No one else had come near her or thought of her, she told herself unreasonably; and now she turned upon him the frank, open look of a child.

Alone in that strange calm, but barely escaped from a grave danger, they looked at each other for a moment through the distorting glass of their common isolation. Suddenly he moved toward her.

"Then may it not be for always?" he whispered. He could gather no other meaning from Medbury's speech at sunset than that he had given up all hope. He himself[Pg 181] was free to speak at last. Yet he must have spoken in any case.

She gave a little backward spring, and laid hold of the shrouds with a hand that trembled.

"But I mean it," he urged. "Try to think of it favorably. You know the work I desire: let us work together. Life would mean so much to me with you near! And for you—it would be in the path of your own desires, to work among the poor."

"I had thought of your work since you spoke of it," she said in a low voice; "and I wondered if they would let me try that—alone, of course, I mean," she added with pretty confusion. "I should like to do some good in the world. I seem so useless now. It gave me a new hope."

She had put him apart from it, she thought. She laid her hand upon the shrouds and dropped her face to it for a moment.

Then sharply across their absorption they heard her father calling to the second mate to order in the boat. Without a word, she slipped aft.

"They've left a cat aboard," he called to Medbury. "She's forward. I shouldn't like to leave even a cat like that." Then he added, as if to show that his humanity was dictated more by reason than by sentiment, "It seems unlucky—as if we'd left her."

[Pg 183]"Well, don't get stove. Just as soon as you come aboard, we'll make sail. There's a little air stirring."

As the boat swung away behind them, the captain told the second mate to rig and sound the pumps. The brig was unusually tight, and it was with no uneasiness that he gave the order, which he considered merely perfunctory.

The first half-dozen strokes told a different tale. He was stooping to grip the spokes of the wheel when the first rush of water sounded on the deck, and its fullness stopped him like a blow in the face. Instantly he blew his whistle over the stern, and called to Medbury to come aboard at once. He heard Medbury's "Aye, aye, sir," and called to the second mate for a lantern. It was already on the quarter-deck when the boat swung out of the darkness in under the stern.

"We got her," Medbury called out, but Captain March made no reply. He swung[Pg 184] the lantern down toward the boat by a lanyard.

"Find where we struck," he said, and, giving the wheel to the second mate, hurried forward.

He was standing on the fore-channel when Medbury brought the boat up, and, going as near as he dared, held the lantern over the side.

"There!" cried Medbury as the light of the lantern flashed over the scarred and abraded spots that they had already noted; but Captain March shook his head impatiently.

The lantern shed a wan light upon the oily sea and the glistening black hull. Five times the brig rose and fell on the easy rollers; then she leaped to a great height, and for an instant, below the bilge, they caught sight of a jagged stretch of copper, torn, and[Pg 185] shrunken like a withered apple. One glance showed that nothing could be done.

They had the boat over the side again in an incredibly short time. As he was rigging the fall to hoist her to her old place on the center-house, Medbury hesitated, and then hurried aft.

"Shall I lash the boat on deck, sir?" he asked, adding significantly: "We may need it."

"No, sir," replied the captain; "hoist it to its place. I don't make preparations to abandon my ship till I've done something to save her. Besides, I want the boat in the safest place if I've got to use it, after all. But I'm not thinking of that yet."

It was not long before the wind was coming out of the northeast in quicker and stronger puffs, and, under every thread of canvas, they began to forge ahead to the dismal clank of the pumps. There was no question of breaking out the cargo, and trying to patch the[Pg 186] leak from the inside. It was to be a rush for port, to the music of the pump-brakes.

Medbury and Drew were standing by the port rail at four bells when Captain March came on deck from a study of his chart. He glanced aloft, looked to windward, then at his binnacle.

"Ease the sheets a little, Mr. Medbury," he said, "and keep her off half a point." He gave the course, then added: "Change the men at the pumps every hour; we'll all have to take a hand at it before it's over. The wind's freshening fast, and that's our chance. We've got to carry everything to-night. Call me in an hour."

"That vessel was burned, sir," he said. He held up his hands, blackened with the charred wood.

[Pg 187]"Somehow she got forward, and the fire spread aft. It was the only spot untouched—the forecastle-deck."

"All right," said the captain; "all right." Then he went below. It was the last bit of sleep he was to get for many an hour.

With started sheets and a freshening breeze, the brig began the song of the road. The laced foam went hissing past her sides, flecked here and there with spots of phosphorescent light; under her fore-foot was the growl of the heaped-up, rolling wave; now and then the shock of a higher sea, thrown back from her bows in a smother of spray, shook her from stem to stern. The fog had gone with the coming of wind, but the rack, like a flock of birds, swept by overhead. The wind began to sigh and whine in the rigging;[Pg 188] with a tremulous, muffled roar the canvas strained and thundered: but through every other noise, insistent, penetrating, sounded the steady thump of the pumps and the rush of water from the spouts.

Once Medbury came aft after changing the men at the pumps, and stopped at the corner of the house to look aloft; he had felt the deck swinging wide under his feet.

He watched the sails for a moment, turning at last with a sigh of satisfaction to Drew, who was standing near.

"She's picking up her skirts like a little lady," he said. His tone was almost exultant.

"It's good to feel the rush of movement again," said Drew; "but I'm a little bewildered yet, it has come and gone so quickly—this strange experience."

"That's the way with things at sea," replied Medbury. "We're always expecting[Pg 189] things to happen, and surprised when they come. But I don't know as it's much different with life in general," he added gloomily. "Trust in nothing—that's the only way to escape being disappointed. Trust in nothing, and be prepared for the worst."

A slim shape came softly up out of the companionway, and, closing the door, paused uncertainly. Facing the wind, the girl thrust back her blowing hair, and looked about her.

"I thought my father was here," she murmured, not knowing whether to go or stay.

"I thought he was here," she repeated. She hesitated a moment, and then turned suddenly to Medbury.

"I can't realize yet what has happened," she went on; "it was so calm and peaceful. It seems the strangest thing."

"Oh, this sort of thing's been done before," replied Medbury. "They can't accuse us of inventing any new kind of foolishness; so don't you go to feeling proud because you think you've found something strange. When you get out to Santa Cruz all the old captains in port will drop aboard and spin yarns about what's happened to them, till you'll think this is the commonest thing in the world."

"You're trying to make me feel safe," she declared; "that frightens me all the more. You take too much pains to assure me. Tell me truly: have you ever been in greater danger?"

"Yes," he answered; "many a time, and only last winter, for once. For five minutes, one night, I thought of more things in my[Pg 192] life than I'd done for twenty years. I haven't done that yet, to-night. I never thought to walk the streets of Blackwater again."

Hetty tried to think how it would seem to feel that she, too, would not walk the streets of Blackwater again. In two months, she remembered, the cherry-trees would be in bloom there; she could see them whitening the whole village. She looked at him and smiled.

"Did you think of it in cherry-time, with all the streets and dooryards white with blossoms?" she asked idly, with a vague notion of distracting her thoughts from the present hour.

"Yes," he answered quietly; "and of other white things—of drawing my sled home from school through the drifts, and glad to be alive."

She caught her breath and turned her face away. She was beginning to understand, she told herself, what it was to be a sailor, and[Pg 193] face danger year after year, living one's life mainly in dreams, with only far-off memories to feed upon. Her eyes filled with tears. Finally she turned to him again with a little smile.

The clock in the cabin struck, and the bell forward repeated the four sharp strokes. A man came aft to relieve the wheel. A moment later Captain March appeared on deck, and walked over to his daughter's side.

"Cap'n," said Medbury, "hadn't you better keep your watch below? I'll change the men at the pumps and take a spell at the wheel myself. We don't need you now."

[Pg 194]They stood in silence a long time, listening to the sounds of the night, and having no inclination to speech. Suddenly, above the roar of the wind, they heard the voice of the lookout crying from the forecastle-deck:

Captain March sprang to the wheel and jammed the helm hard up; Medbury ran forward. He had scarcely reached the forecastle-deck when the light came abreast, a cable's length away. All at once it began to swing in a short, quick arc, and the people on the brig heard the cry of voices. It swept past them like a banshee, with the light swinging frantically, and the sound of oars chopping the sea in short, irregular strokes. The next moment the brig came up into the wind with rattling blocks and slapping canvas, and Captain March was roaring orders in a mighty voice, while the watch below[Pg 195] streamed out upon the deck like a hive of frightened bees.

[Pg 197]They lay with sails shaking and a flare burning over the quarter, and listened for the sound of oars again, with the brig rolling and thrashing under them. They heard it at last, and a voice urging the rowers on; and soon a boat came out of the blackness of the night, reeling crazily over the seas.

Medbury stood on the rail, with the crew clustered behind him, as the boat swung in.

"Steady!" he sang out. "Steady there, or you'll swamp her! Hold off, and watch your chance!"

There came a "smooth," and the boat shot in, and a black little figure leaped upon a thwart, and, steadied by two men, was swung up over the rail and to the deck by Medbury almost before he realized that it was a woman.

[Pg 198]"Mon Dieu!" she cried, "eet iss betteh—dees." She watched the others coming over the rail, and, when all were safe, turned to Medbury with a little courtesy. "Eet iss ver' romanteec tow be safed from doze salt wateh by so nize young gentleman," she murmured, with a gleeful face. "Yo' happen tow be a mah'ied man, maybe?"

"Ah ahm mo' gladdeh faw tow see yo' naw ahnybody," she said. "Ah see nut'ing but doze mens all tam. Ah t'ink Ah go git crezzy," she added laughingly.

[Pg 199]They got the brig on her course again, and took the captain of the boat and his two passengers down into the cabin. The captain said his vessel was a Danish bark from Copenhagen, bound for Santa Cruz, and she had been burned two days before. They had taken to their boats, but, as there was no wind, they had lingered near, in the hope that the smoke from the burning vessel would be a beacon for some rescuer. But no vessel had been sighted, and before night came on they had started on their long road. Their other boat had been lost in the fog.

The captain had told his story in fair English, and at its close he turned to his passengers, and said they were going home to Santa Cruz, where the young man, a lieutenant in the army, was stationed. His sister, Miss Stromberg, he added, lived with her brother. As he mentioned their names, he bowed. Both rose, and, passing gravely around the group, shook hands with all. They were much alike[Pg 200]—small, dark-haired, with handsome, piquant faces. Life seemed a huge joke to both.

"Mooch mo' nizeh," her brother agreed. He smiled, and bowed to the collected company, beginning with Hetty and ending with her.

"I hope so," said Captain March; then he turned to the Danish captain and added: "I'm glad to get your men; I've already found your vessel."

When he had finished the story of his own misfortune, he went up on deck, followed by the two rescued men.

"My dear," said Mrs. March to the girl, "you must be tired out. Now you must have something to eat and then go straight to bed. My daughter can easily take you in her room."

[Pg 201]The girl laughed, and, leaning forward, placed her hand on the speaker's knee.

"Ah t'ink das iss mos' kind, lak ma own modder. Das iss ve'y nize. How s'all Ah say no at so kind heaht? Ah t'ink Ah ahm 'mos' t'ousand year' old, and 'mos' aslip—me." Her shoulders drooped; her eyes closed. "And das iss ve'y impolite wiz so kind, good peop'!" Her eyes opened again, and begged forgiveness for the discourtesy.

"Nonsense, child!" said Mrs. March. "I should think you'd be half dead. I only hope you won't find worse trouble here; though I must say we deserve all we get for trusting ourselves on the water—we women."

"Ah!" she murmured piteously. Her eyes caught Drew's look, and she smiled. "Yo' lak eet, maybe?" she asked him.

[Pg 202]"Yes," he answered; "or at least until to-night. But I do not know it well."

"Mr. Drew is a minister of the gospel," explained Mrs. March, with dignity; then she added with smiling derision: "He thinks he's taking a pleasure trip."

"Ah!"—Miss Stromberg flashed a bright smile upon Drew—"das iss ve'y nize tow be a mineester—tow be so good as tow prich tow peop'. Ma fader one also wass; but me—" she shrugged her shoulders—"Ah find das ve'y hahd tow be so good all da tam. Eet iss ve'y sad not tow tek doze examp' off ma fader." She sighed.

Her brother and Captain Rand joined her at supper, and brother and sister were very gay; but the captain ate hurriedly, and speedily returned to the deck. Lieutenant Stromberg soon followed him, but Drew lingered. Miss Stromberg had been telling her experiences in the wreck.

"He!" she exclaimed, with gay scorn. "He knows not. Eet iss woman's paht tow deceife efer. Yo' learn so not alretty?" She laughed in his face.

"Now I shall be on my guard," he answered, and, going up the companionway, laughingly bade her good night.

Smilingly he walked to the rail, and, leaning his elbows on it, looked out into the night. Medbury, walking the deck, stopped at his side.

"Well, she's a little flirt," said Medbury. "Did you hear what she said to me when she came aboard? It took away my breath for a minute." He laughed.

"She's audacious," said Drew; "but I think that's all. I should rather say she is bent on amusing herself. I should call her remarkably sincere."

"Well, she's remarkably pretty," replied Medbury. "And what a voice! She makes that lingo of hers sound like a pretty little piece of music. I hope we'll not have to make her take to the boat again."

Until then Drew had hardly thought of the wind. Now it seemed like the pressure of a hand against his face. The darkness of the night was relieved by a luminous haze close down to the sea, which seemed to radiate a[Pg 205] mysterious light that was like an opaque spray. The stars were gone, and the wind no longer came in gusts, but in a great rush of sound that overbore speech like the beat of a corps of drums, near and threatening. Every strand of rigging twanged in the sweep of the gale; the canvas hummed with a muffled roar; now and then a wave broke amidships with a sudden shock, and ran hissing across the deck.

Medbury had gone forward to the pumps, which stopped suddenly, and Drew felt his way along the house to the break in the deck. A group stood about the well with a lantern, and Medbury was bending over it. "Slack three feet and a half," he said, straightening up. Captain March turned away without a word, and walked aft; but Drew stayed to see the pumps rigged again and their wearying thump begin once more, with four men at the bars. As Medbury passed him, Drew asked him what it was.

It came on to rain later, at first a few small drops out of the black sky, and then a driving sheet that seemed to sweep straight on and never to fall. One by one the passengers disappeared, and Captain March and Medbury, in oilskins, held the quarter-deck with the man at the wheel. Back and forth across the deck the captain walked, now climbing to windward, with his body bent forward and his legs far apart, now braced back, and taking short steps down the wet incline, and sometimes breaking into a little run and checking himself at the rail. Medbury stood for the most part at the windward corner of the house, going forward from time to time, but never for long. They rarely spoke.

"Steer hard?" he asked good-naturedly. He had shouted, for the uproar was now too great for ordinary speech.

"Guess I'll take a hold with you," shouted the captain, and stepped to his side; but Medbury touched his arm.

Medbury cast an uneasy look aloft at the maintopsail. In the murky light he could see it bellied out like a great bowl.

"Couldn't budge it, if I wanted to," he said to himself. "I wonder how long that sail's going to stand all this."

He started forward, shot in under the lee of the center-house as a great green sea came over the rail, and, dripping, mounted to the forecastle-deck. The lookout stood with his arms clasped about the capstan-head, staring straight ahead. In his yellow oilskins, he had the look of a wooden man, washed by the seas, immobile, without sensation.

Medbury took him by the shoulder, and he barely turned his head. His face was as[Pg 209] emotionless as his figure; only his eyes showed life.

"You'll—" Medbury lowered his head as he began to shout, for a sheet of spray sprang at his face like a cat, blinding him and making him gasp. Then he felt the deck slipping into a bottomless abyss, and, opening his eyes, saw the jibboom disappear, then the bowsprit, while over the bow rolled a great green wave, shot with white, and irradiated with phosphorescence. Almost to the waist it buried them, while they stood for what seemed an interminable time, clasping the capstan, with the dragging water roaring about them. The strange fancy flashed across Medbury's mind that it was like being on the nose of a gigantic mole frantically burrowing underground. Then the bow rose again, shook itself free, and Medbury and the sailor, unlocking their grip on the capstan, looked at each other.

"You'll have to get out of this," shouted[Pg 210] Medbury, finishing what he had begun to say. The man nodded.

"That was the first bad one, sir," he yelled back. "I don't know's I mind bein' drownded, but I don't want to be speared to death." He looked aloft, where the lighter spars and sails seemed like a falling arch above him. "I've been expectin' to get that royal-yard through my back for the last hour. Couldn't hear it if it did tumble—in all this noise."

"Well, you'll have to get out of this," Medbury repeated mechanically. "Go up to the top of the center-house. You'll be safe there."

"She's burrowing a good deal," he shouted in the captain's ear—"like an old mole."

"I sent the lookout up to the top of the center-house," Medbury now called. "No place for him forward."

"That's right," answered Captain March; then he nodded his head to show that he had heard and approved.

The watch was changed at twelve, and the second mate came on deck, but Medbury still lingered. Captain March would not leave the wheel. At three bells Medbury sounded the pumps again, and reported a full three and a half feet of water in the hold. It had gained two inches in three hours.

Captain March merely nodded when he was told, and turned his inscrutable face aloft.

The night was dragging on toward the hour when the watch on deck is the hardest to bear. In his weariness of body and mind, Medbury had grown indifferent to the tremendous rush of the wind. The noises of the night no longer seemed near him, but far off, muffled by some strange mental wind-break that hedged him in as if by a wall. Once or twice he caught himself nodding, and looked up, startled, to take a turn or two across the deck. His mind was tense with the mental strain, and the changing of the men at the pumps, or any pause in the monotony of the uproar, irritated him, as the stopping of a railroad train at stations affects one dozing through a long journey. He was[Pg 213] not afraid,—he had even begun to exult in the self-control of his superior, seeing in his perfect handling of his vessel something uncanny, even godlike,—yet he was all the while keenly alive to the thought that Hetty lay below, within the circle of impending danger. It was like being compelled to run for one's life under a great weight.

It was past four bells when the maintopsail split with a sharp report like musketry-fire, and, looking up, they saw black space where just before they had seen a gray hollow of canvas loom through the night. A ragged fringe of gray flapped along the bolt-ropes, whipping straight out in the force of the gale. They let tack and sheet go with a rush, and strove to clew up the topsail, trying to save, in the stoical following of habit, what was no longer worth saving.

Medbury came aft when they had clewed up what remained of the sail. It seemed ludicrous to try to stow that frazzled bit of[Pg 214] whipping canvas. He went close to the captain.

"I didn't stow it, sir," he shouted in his ear. "Didn't seem worth while to send a man aloft. No place for him. Nothing but a rag left."

"No, no," the captain roared. "That's right. Don't want to expose anybody more'n we can help." His voice seemed far away—detached, as it were, in some strange manner.

"Yes," he yelled. He nodded aloft. "Been expecting that." Then, for the first time in his life, he became communicative as to his plans at sea. "It's like this," he went on: "We've got five hundred miles to run in this craft or an open boat. I'll make it in this, if I can. Got to take some risk, you know.[Pg 215] Can't afford to take in sail as long as she carries it. When it goes of its own accord, well and good. Can't help that."

Medbury had begun to long, with an indescribable sense of weariness, for the coming of day. Once, as he looked eastward, it seemed to him that the curtain of darkness had lifted: the crests of the waves no longer showed a vivid contrast to the black body of the watery waste, but both were fading into a neutral tone of gray, and objects on board began to have more definite outlines. Then all at once the royal flew out of its bolt-ropes, like a hound loosened from its leash, and went twisting and snapping into the night.

Medbury saw the yard lowered to its place and all things made snug forward. As he passed under the foresail to go aft again, he had to brace himself against the wind, which drew under the sail like a great flue. Every cord of the sail seemed vibrant with sound; and as he staggered on, out of the tail of[Pg 216] his eye he watched the mainsail tug at its sheet, and boom and gaff swing up like straws. As his head rose above the top of the house, he saw that Captain March's eyes were following him, and he turned his own away.

"If he sees me watching that mainsail," he said to himself, "he'll think I'm wondering why he doesn't take it in." He smiled grimly. "Well, that would be God's truth; but he sha'n't know it." So he stood and gazed steadily seaward.

Now it was surely day—day that showed itself in a gray sea leaping against a gray sky. A driving mist, too vaporous to be called rain, gave the same neutral tone to the vessel, which seemed to have lost her individuality overnight. She had the tired, lifeless look of the men on her deck; and as she groaned and whined along the watery road, her aspect was at once human and wholly sad. Though they were far to the south, the[Pg 217] mist was cold upon their faces. Now and then a dash of spray flew across the quarter-deck, and its greater warmth was pleasant in comparison. By eight o'clock the water in the hold had gained six inches, and the crew were beginning to lose heart.

The group that gathered in the cabin that day had the restlessness of people waiting to start on a long journey. In her growing fear, Mrs. March hungered for companionship; she steadily kept to the cabin, refusing to go to her room, but half-sat, half-reclined upon the lounge, and watched the wooden walls reel about her. Whenever an unusually heavy sea rolled them down, she gripped the back of the lounge and prayed in silence; and when it passed she looked about her with a spent face. Hetty and Miss Stromberg sat in steamer-chairs, talked a little, and sometimes laughed without reason; from time to time they staggered to their room, never remaining long, or losing for a moment the[Pg 218] aspect of being about to do something quite different. Drew tried to be cheerful, but felt that he was only inane; now and then he read in a book that at other times he held closed over his finger. All day Lieutenant Stromberg sat at the table and played solitaire, resolutely forbearing to cheat himself, being restrained by the thought that he might be near his last hour. At times he made jokes that no one seemed to understand, and then looked up wonderingly when he laughed alone.

It was afternoon when Hetty, unable longer to bear the thought of the dark, close cabin,—all the windows had now been battened down and the skylight covered,—made her way to the forward companionway, and, opening the doors, looked out upon the deck with eyes wide with wondering fear. The leeward rail was level with the sea, which boiled about it; the deck ran like a mill-race. The sky was lost in the driving mist, which[Pg 219] closed about them in a gray wall that seemed like a barrier to hide the impending dangers beyond. Clinging to the door, she stepped out upon the deck and glanced aft. The wind beat her down like a flower-stalk, and she crouched upon the door-step. But Medbury had seen her, and hurried to her side.

"You mustn't stay here; you know you mustn't," he protested. "We may ship a sea at any time." He himself was dripping, and his face was rosy with the damp wind: he looked like Neptune's very brother.

"Yes," she cried; "yes; I'll go in a minute. I couldn't stand it down there another second." She lifted her face above the house for an instant, and nodded aft. "What is that for?"

Above the taffrail, from quarter to quarter, a stout piece of canvas had been stretched between two upright poles, shutting off the outlook astern. Medbury glanced toward it before he replied.

[Pg 220]"That?" he said. "Oh, to keep the spray off the glass of the binnacle. It clouds it so the men can't read the compass." It did not seem to him wise to tell her that it was to keep the helmsmen from glancing over their shoulders at the following seas, and perhaps losing their nerve at a critical moment. "Please go down now; it makes me nervous to see you here."

"Oh," she murmured, and looked away, thinking of his qualifying "any woman." He had never spoken like that before—classed her with other women. It showed that he had accepted the situation, and she told herself that she was glad; nevertheless, it was not an unmixed gladness: for the first[Pg 221] time she felt that something had gone out of her life that she had always calmly accepted as being as unchanging as her native hills. Yet it seemed unreasonable that it should sadden her. With a little shrug of impatience she put the thought away just as he leaned to speak to her again.

"Won't you go below now, Hetty?" he said, with a touch of impatience. "I can't stay here."

"You know what I mean well enough," he said. "I can't leave you here alone. You are a little tease, for all you can be so dignified at times."

"If you call me names, I shall certainly be dignified," she declared. She looked away as she added: "You wouldn't call Miss Stromberg a tease, I'm sure."

[Pg 222]"Oh, I just think so. The dominie says she isn't, though. It's only fair to say that," he replied.

He did not think it necessary to answer this, but stood looking out over the deck with unseeing eyes. A wave broke at the side, leaped up, and swept across the deck in a sheet of spray.

"It's better than that stuffy cabin," she answered, feeling an exhilaration in the salt spray and the wind. There was comfort in his presence, too, though she hardly acknowledged it to herself. It had needed this storm and the danger to bring back to her all her old ideals of manliness, cherished in her girlhood in the little seaport, but weakened[Pg 223] by her later acquaintance with a widely different life.

"It hurt me," she said. She paused, but he did not speak, and she went on: "We can always be friends, then, can't we?"

"Oh, yes," he said at last; "we'll be friends. I'm going back to the old long voyages again as soon as I can—in Santa Cruz, if your father will let me off. In a year or two, or perhaps three, I may go back home, and we may meet on the street, and shake hands, and smile, and you will go away satisfied.[Pg 224] 'He's my friend yet,' you may say, and maybe think of me again in a year or two, or perhaps meet me and bow as we pass. Or, more likely, you will go away, and, coming back again after a long time, meet a bent, brown old man and not recognize him. Or you may ask about me, and be told: 'Oh, he died long ago, in the South Pacific or Japan, or some other God-forsaken place.' 'I knew him long ago,' you'll say, and then go on asking about others. I guess that's what friendship like ours comes to mean."

He turned to her as he ceased, and saw her rising to a stooping position under the low sliding-hood. Her face was white.

In the cabin Lieutenant Stromberg was still playing solitaire; at the opposite side of the table his sister sat, with Drew beside her, reading aloud, as she took a lesson in English.

"Yo' pro-nouns doze d in 'chillen'?" Her concerned eyes flashed an anxious look up at Drew.

"Ah t'ink doze ahs ve'y difficult tow pro-nouns. Alone, no; but wiz doze ot'er let's doze bec-ome los'." She laughed again.

"Meesteh Drew all tam rid doze poetry; so Ah say tow tich me doze lang-widge mo' betteh," she explained. "Ah was tich tow rid doze Anglish by ma home tow Denmahk, but Ah leahn tow spik eet off ma black maid tow St. Croix. She spik ve'y nize, but so sho'tly, Ah unnehstahnd heh not alwis."

"Fastly, rapidly," explained Lieutenant Stromberg, looking up from his cards. "Ma sisteh's Anglish iss only a second coosin off das real Anglish—second coosin twice remove'—t'r-rough Denmar-r-k and[Pg 228] Afr-r-rica." Lieutenant Stromberg knew his r's.

"I think she speaks beautifully, with such opportunities," Hetty replied, with spirit.

"Ah t'ank yo' exceedin'," she said. She looked at her book, sighed, looked up again, and continued: "But doze poetry mek me tow haf doze sadness—me." She sighed again and shook her head. "Yo' lak doze poetry?"

The questioner laid the book hesitatingly on the table, and her hands drifted together in her lap.

"Ah t'ink das iss mos' coh'ect," she agreed. "Eet iss not alwis possible tow lak eet when yo' s'all t'ink off ot'er t'ings—doze noise' and stohms," she explained.

"Yet yo' s'all desire to heah doze noise' ofer once mo' when yo' rich St. Croix," said the lieutenant, without looking up from his[Pg 229] game. "'Ah, doze beau-tiful noise'!' yo' s'all say—'so poetical!'" He laughed mischievously.

"We shall miss many things when we reach St. Croix," said Drew, looking at them and smiling.

Hetty glanced at him, then she leaned forward and put her hand on the Danish girl's arm.

"Ah, no!" Brother and sister spoke together. He turned and bowed to his sister smilingly.

"Ah, no!" she repeated; "yo' s'all coam at our house alwis; da do' s'all stahnd wide faw yo' fawefer." Her eyes included them all in the invitation.

"Ah wass going tow spik doze sem lak ma sisteh," said the brother, with a magnificent bow.

[Pg 230]"Shuah-lee!" laughed the Danish girl. "And yo' s'all rid eet in doze gahden, among doze floweh' mos' beautiful, wiz doze o'ange-tree' and t'ibet-tree' meking doze cool shadow, and doze sea-watah fah be-low shining in da sun. And noise—yo' s'all heah on-lee doze sea-watah mu'mu'ing soft-lee, and doze fountains whispehing, and possibly a lil' song ofehhead, and maybe some dahkies pahssing be-hin' doze high wall, calling tow sell yo' some t'ings ve'y nize—and nut'in' mo'."

"Hot arepa! hot arepa dem! Ya da hot arepa!" In a high, slurring singsong Lieutenant Stromberg gave the cry of the negro women street-venders.

She smiled, looked up, caught his gaze; her own dropped to her hands clasped in her lap.

"Sh-h!" she exclaimed, while her eyes bubbled with laughter. "Why spik off doze when we go-ing in-vite peop' at ouah house? Possibly doze coam not aany mo'—doze huh'icane."

For a moment Mrs. March had forgotten the rolling vessel and the threatening sea. "The little tyke!" she said to herself, smilingly; but her daughter spoke aloud.

"Why do you make such a beautiful picture of it?" she asked. "Don't you know that I must go back to the cold and the snow?"

"Yo' s'all cah not," she answered. "Yo' s'all say, 'Oh, doze huh'icane!' Wheah da heaht iss, da iss da beautiful pictu'. So womens ah med," she added wisely.

"'Tiss joost heah—and unfast," she replied, and placed her hand on her breast. "Eet hass no feexed 'abitation."

On deck they heard the tramp of feet going aft, and then, as the starboard side lifted, the cry of the crew hauling in the main sheet, and the hoarse croak of the blocks. Before the tramp was heard again, going forward, Captain March came from his room and hurried up to the deck.

"One of the flanges of the pump gave 'way, sir," answered the mate, "and we couldn't use but one bar; so I rigged up that whiz-jig. It's better than one bar, and, besides, we can work it from the poop. If things should get much worse, the men would drown on the main-deck."

"About the same—inch by inch. But she's getting a little logy, it seems to me; and if the wind should go down or haul ahead—" He paused in gloomy silence.

He walked to the rail and took down the marking of the log-line, and then went below[Pg 234] to lay out his position on the chart. For two days he had had no sun to take an observation, and could trust only to dead-reckoning. Carefully he laid out his course and marked the distance traveled, then tried to calculate how far the heave of the sea and the set of the current had modified his right position. At last he pricked out the spot with all the appearance of certainty, made a light ring about the dot, and was rolling up his chart as his daughter came to his side.

As she spoke, the stern of the brig seemed[Pg 235] to sink to a great depth, swing wide, then settle again, and there came a crash of falling seas upon the deck, and a wave went hissing across the house, falling in sloppy cascades before the window facing forward, which had not been battened. An instant later the captain was on deck.

The canvas screen about the taffrail was flapping loose from one of the poles; Medbury, with dripping oilskins, was at the wheel with one of the helmsmen, but the other was under the lee rail with his head down in his hands.

"That was a heavy one, sir," called Medbury as he bent to the spokes. He straightened up, panting, and nodded to the man who was down. "Don't think he's much hurt," he shouted.

Captain March walked over to the sailor, and, leaning over him, took him by the shoulder.

"I struck my head against the bitts," he said slowly. "I guess it stunned me for a minute."

The man, with fingers that trembled, slowly unbuttoned his sou'wester, took it off, and fumbled about his head. The captain watched him.

"Well, you better look out next time," he called with mild severity, which stopped short of positive reproof. "I guess you were watching over your shoulder more'n you were your course. Well, now you go forward and send Charlie aft."

"No," said the captain; "I'll take a hold. Just get that canvas lashed up again, will you?" Then he took the wheel, which he was[Pg 237] not to leave again, except for one brief moment, until the end.

When Medbury had lashed the screen fast, Captain March nodded to him to come near, that he might speak.

"Better start your topsail-sheets a bit," he shouted. "They'll lift a little and ease her. Give 'em about two feet—no more'n that."

As the afternoon wore on, the wind increased in force and the sea grew heavier. Now and then a sharp shower swept past, and ceased suddenly; but the clouds did not lift, and the rack flew overhead, low down, like steam from a huge exhaust-pipe. At seven bells a topgallantsail-sheet parted, and by the time the sail was housed and the yard lowered it was dusk.

As Medbury prepared to go aft again, he paused by the fore-rigging and looked up. The canvas was thundering like a drum corps; the lee rigging swung slack, but that to windward[Pg 238] was as stiff as iron, and shrilled like a score of fifes or roared like organ-pipes.

"Oh, shut up!" he said aloud, and then grinned shamefacedly at his irritability.

As he came to the steps leading up to the poop-deck, he paused and looked about him. It seemed to him that the wind had suddenly ceased, and he could hear it far away, roaring back a defiance through the murky twilight. The next moment he heard the captain shouting to call all hands and shorten sail.

With the crew increased by the men from the lost Danish bark, they had all things made snug and fast in an incredibly short time, and under maintopmast-staysail with the bonnet out, lower topsail, and foretopmast-staysail, they were rolling down the long seas in leisurely fashion by the time night was fairly upon them.

Still panting with his heavy exertion, Medbury was standing by the taffrail, looking down at the foam that now seemed only to[Pg 239] creep by them, and thinking gloomily of the water rising in the hold, when suddenly he became aware of an increase in the weight of the wind upon his face. He looked up, but, seeing nothing, glanced down again; but in that brief moment the foam had disappeared, and he was gazing into blackness. He turned quickly, only to see that the same darkness had swallowed up the men at the wheel and every part of the vessel. The binnacle-light was burning, but the dim glow stopped short at the slide: beyond that it seemed to have no power to go. With an indescribable sensation of being absolutely cut off from every living thing, he stepped quickly toward the wheel, and, putting out his hand, touched his captain. It gave him a curious feeling of intense relief. Then he heard Captain March speaking in a calm voice that quieted him instantly.

"It came on all of a sudden," the mate went on. He wanted to hear his voice and the voice of the captain: in some curious way even the trivial words seemed to mitigate the awful darkness.

"Maybe you'd better get out some lines for the men at the pumps, and make 'em fast across deck," continued the captain. "We can't afford to lose anybody overboard. And bring us some, too. When you've done that, just go down to your room, as if you'd gone to fetch something. Maybe it'll help the women-folks a little to see somebody from the deck before it begins," he went on in a matter-of-fact voice. "But don't stay. I may want you any minute."

In haste, and with hands that fumbled a little, Medbury rigged stout life-lines across the deck for the men at the pumps; and,[Pg 241] leaving straps for the captain and his companion at the wheel, descended into the cabin. He struck a match in his room, and looked about him vaguely, smiling to himself at his purposeless errand at a time when moments were fraught with life or death. He was not, like his captain, a man of imagination: his mere passage through the cabin seemed only a bit of fanciful foolishness of which he was a trifle ashamed.

His match flickered and went out; for a moment he stood staring before him in the darkness, hearing the voices of those in the cabin as they talked together. He heard Drew's deep tones, and Hetty replying to them, and a sudden impotent rush of jealousy overwhelmed him as he thought that he must battle on deck in what might be their last fight, while this man, who had known her barely as many days as he had loved her years, would be with her in these last hours. Blindly, without looking to right or left, he[Pg 242] walked through the cabin and ascended to the deck.

Though he had been below only a moment, an amazing change had taken place. As he seized the hasp of the door to open it, the pressure from the outside was so great that for a moment he thought that some one was leaning against it. He knocked on it loudly, then pushed again, becoming immediately aware that the resisting force was wind. Then throwing all his weight forward, he squeezed through, with the door slamming to behind him.

It was only the beginning. The seas seemed to grow momentarily heavier, and it became impossible to stand erect upon the deck. When Medbury went forward to the pumps, as he did from time to time, he went with bent body, keeping his hand upon the rail. His face was stiffened with salt, which clung to his eyelashes and had to be wiped away constantly. It became in time no longer possible[Pg 243] to distinguish sounds: the bellow of the wind, the roar of the sea, the thunder of the canvas, and the groaning of spars and timber, became merged in an indescribable tumult, the waves of which, like a great sea of sound, seemed to rise about them and beat them down into insignificance. In this strange melting away of all the known landmarks of his craft, Medbury stood at times helpless and irresolute, and doggedly awaited the end.

To those shut up in the cabin there came, as the night wore on, a sense of impending danger. Once, unable longer to bear the feeling of isolation from those who were fighting on deck for their lives, Hetty made her way with difficulty to the companionway, and, mounting to the doors, tried them. Then she turned.

"They have locked us in!" she cried, staring down at her companions. The lamp, swinging in its gimbals, cast only a faint light upon their upturned, startled faces. Her[Pg 244] lips trembled. "It makes me afraid," she faltered.

Miss Stromberg burst into tears. Hetty hurried down to her, and, sitting close together on the lounge, the two clasped each other's hands, listening. The men sat with closed eyes for the most part. Mrs. March had long before gone to her room.

Once there came three unusually heavy seas, and as the brig rolled down it seemed to Hetty that they never would rise again, and, closing her eyes, she prayed silently. Then there came the long "smooth," and she opened her eyes and smiled upon her companion.

"Do yo' t'ink Ah s'all be los' once mo'?"[Pg 245] asked the girl. "Ah ahm tow lit' tow was'e all doze sto'ms on—me." She laughed hysterically.

"Ah pray Ah may slip mo' sound-lee," she murmured laughingly. "But yo'—yo' haf doze cou'age!" she added admiringly.

"Das iss ve'y nize." She turned suddenly to Drew. "Wass yo' t'ink off?" she asked him.

"Eet iss a ve'y nize gahden," said Lieutenant Stromberg, "but eet iss not so nize as yo' s'all t'ink. Nut'in' iss," he explained. "Eet s'all bec-ome dull—lak dees, lak efer't'ing. Me—Ah s'all play doze cahds." He laughed, and, taking his cards from the glass rack, began another game of solitaire.

One by one the idlers in the cabin went to their rooms, and Drew, putting on a storm-coat, stepped out upon the deck from the forward companionway, blinded for a moment by the darkness.

Slowly the shadowy world took on blurred outlines, and, turning his gaze to windward, he saw gray flashes of foam leap high on the pointed crests of waves, and drop quickly into darkness. The gale tore at him and beat him down. He remembered that he had seen a sou'wester in his room, and went softly below to get it. As he opened the door that led from the passageway to the cabin, Hetty, with swinging arms, went staggering across the unsteady floor toward the pantry. With a[Pg 248] little thrill of joy at finding her alone once more, Drew hastened to her side.

She was on her knees, peering about her; but, startled by the sudden obscurity that fell upon the room, she looked up quickly, to see him standing in the doorway.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "how you frightened me!" and turned to her search again. "I was looking for something for my mother," she explained when, a moment later, she rose to her feet. "I cannot find it." Still glancing vaguely about her, she moved toward the doorway and made as if to pass him; but he did not stir.

He had sought her with no other purpose than to be by her side for a moment; for, though he had not seen her alone since he had asked her to be his wife, he knew that this was not the fitting hour for his answer: but neither could he let her go.

[Pg 249]"I cannot bear to see you suffer," he exclaimed. "Do not think our case hopeless. It cannot be. We shall reach land yet."

"Oh, you cannot know," she said listlessly. She had no thought to be indifferent or cruel; standing, as she felt, face to face with eternity, her thoughts had passed him by. She had come to regions where he was a vague shadow, a part of a world no longer hers. She was only the sailor's daughter now; all her faith and dreams lay with those who were battling on the deck for the lives of all.

Silently he stepped aside, and she went quickly to her room, closing the door behind her and not looking back.

He could not summon to his mind a single thread of proof; yet, as he turned away, he knew that unconsciously she had given him her answer. The closing door between them, he told himself, was the symbol.

He was paler when he went up the companionway again, and his lips were firmly[Pg 250] closed; but there was no harshness in their lines, and he carried his head high: clearly he would bear whatever life brought to him.

A moment later, as he stepped into the blinding darkness of the deck, a wave broke near, and a sheet of water, clipped from the toppling crest by the wind, swept across the house and struck him like a lash. Staggered for an instant, with his hand slipping from the sliding-hood, he dropped behind the house.

He was still kneeling on the deck, brushing the water from his eyes, when he felt rather than heard or saw some one go by. He would be sent below, he knew, if seen by the captain or the mate; and he smiled as he thought of his position, feeling like a schoolboy in mischief and in danger of detection. Slowly he turned, and, without rising, watched the passing figure.

It was six bells, and Medbury had come forward to change the crew at the pumps. As he stepped past the house and made his way[Pg 251] to the life-lines, he lifted his eyes and stopped short. The pumps were deserted. Then he rushed forward and peered down upon the main-deck; only the sloppy space showed itself, unrelieved by a human figure. One of the down-hauls of the whiz-jig, whipping in the gale, snapped across his face, and was flung irritably aside.

In the first rush of his dismay the thought came to him that all were lost; but the possibility of four men being swept away without warning was too much to believe, and across his mind there flashed the certainty that the crew had refused longer to work the pumps. That they had been losing heart had been borne in upon him increasingly, and now that he stood face to face with the desperate situation he felt his face grow hot with the fury that seized him and bore him out of himself. Some instinct told him that they had taken refuge down the booby-hatchway, and he sprang to the sliding-hood, thrust it back, and[Pg 252] peered in. It was black and still, but the intangible something that betrays the presence of human creatures seemed to pervade the place, and he knew that his quarry was there. His voice choked with fury as he yelled:

"You damn' curs—you—you—want to ruin us all! Out of this—quick, or I shoot you down like rats in a hole!"

No sound came out of the black interior, and with a snarl of rage he tore open the door, splintering the peg in the hasp, thrust one foot over the sill to descend, and struck the back of a man. The next instant he had the man by the collar, lifted him struggling to the deck, and with a mighty swing sent him forward into the life-lines, where he hung for a second, and then fell lightly, like a sprawling cat, to the main-deck. With a snarl, Medbury swung himself into the opening, and dropped between decks. Three men had been sitting on the steps below the man he had thrown out, and he swept them off like leaves[Pg 253] from a wand, and he heard their smothered groans as he crushed them together in a heap on the floor. He was in his own province now, for the storeroom was his care, and he could have found a sail-needle there in the dark; and as he freed himself from the sprawling bodies under him, he swung about him, reaching out, with itching hands, for his cowed and dispirited crew.

He felt an arm encircle his legs, and kicked back viciously, feeling rather than hearing his heel crunch against a face. The arm about his legs dropped limp, and he felt another pawing along his shoulders and reaching for his throat. With a quick thrust he found a bristly face, and, striking straight with his free arm, sent the man tumbling to the floor. He heard the sound of feet stumbling up the stairs, and thought the fight was won, and so moved back, only to find shoulders and legs clasped by other men. He clasped back, and the next moment was staggering about the[Pg 254] place in a hand-to-hand struggle. He kicked himself free again, and with a quick thrust forward threw himself to the floor, an opponent under him. He heard the sailor's head strike hard, felt his hold relax, and rose, panting, to his knees as a lantern swung in at the door, and Captain March's voice, cool and incisive, called, "Stop right there!" Looking up, Medbury saw the light of the lantern shining along the barrel of a pistol, and the captain's impassive face above it.

They put every man at the pumps, lashing them to the life-lines, and, with a belaying-pin in his hand, Medbury stood guard over them and rushed them at their work. Now and then a fitful flash of lightning showed the men and the deck against a background of vitreous green glare.

Captain March watched them a moment, and then, placing his hand on his mate's shoulder, yelled at his ear. Even then the words seemed far away and indistinct.

"Keep 'em going! Don't let 'em slack up a bit!" he roared. "Never had such a lot aboard a vessel of mine before. It makes me sick."

"Don't understand it," went on the captain in an aggrieved, plaintive voice; "nobody could." He paused irresolutely, and then said: "Hurt you anywhere?"

"Oh, no," answered the mate. "Guess I rather enjoyed it for a change. Was pretty mad."

"The dominie saw something was wrong, and told me. Got your lantern, too. Good man—seemed to know what to do. Rather surprised me—don't think they've got that[Pg 258] sort of horse-sense, as a rule. But no business on deck to-night. Told him so." Then he staggered aft, and took the wheel from the second mate again.

Drew had gone below when the crew went back to the pumps; but he was strangely excited. He knew that he could not sleep, and in a state of mental helplessness he sat for a long time upon the edge of his bunk. Something of the significance of the scene on deck broke in upon him, and he realized that the crew had given up hope. It was not revolt, but a dumb, sheeplike acquiescence in fate. In his heart he was not without a certain sympathy for the men, feeling in the overpowering mastery of the storm something of the vanity of all human endeavor. Yet the mere effort of holding himself in check, aloof from all the tumult of the deck, grew momentarily more and more unbearable, and, rising at last, he went up to the companionway door again.

[Pg 259]He saw at once, novice as he was, that in his brief absence the situation had grown worse. There was a constant sweep of sheeted spray across the deck, and he crouched behind the house, as he had done before, both for protection and to avoid being seen by the mate. He resented the thought of being ordered below. He could see the steady rise and fall of the bodies of the men working the pumps, and Medbury standing near them. It had grown lighter, he perceived, though it was still black night.

He was beginning to grow drowsy, and for a moment shifted his position, when suddenly the brig seemed to pause and tremble, then spring to a great height, and the next moment he had the sensation of falling in a dream, and heard Medbury's voice, faint, muffled, like a voice coming from a great distance underground, screaming, "Hold hard! Hold hard!"

[Pg 260]In a second of time, in the light of the foam that whitened the sea to leeward, he saw the deck clearly: the men crouching low above the life-lines; Medbury's face turned away, his hands grasping a line about his waist, his body braced; and behind him, rising from his knees, a man with uplifted arm about to strike. The next moment Drew threw himself forward upon the man, and at the same instant was crushed against the booby-hatch by a great weight of water. He was held there till his ears roared and flashes of light snapped before his eyes and his breath was almost gone; then he felt himself lifted and whirled along for what seemed a great distance, with the body of the man he had seized struggling in his grasp. He had at that moment the feeling that his end had come, that he was being borne far from the garden with the fountain, and from that other garden where he saw his mother kneeling with a flower in her hand and her eyes[Pg 261] turned up to him smilingly. With these scenes standing out vividly in a dream where all things else were strange unrealities, he was suddenly awakened to life by the crash of his body against something cruelly hard, felt a sharp sting under his arm, pressed it down tight, and fell to the deck alone.

Groping in the darkness, almost breathless, half-blinded by water, he got to his feet and looked about him. He was standing by the lee rail, but the man with whom he had struggled was gone, blotted out. He remembered the sting in his side, and, lifting his hand to the place, struck the haft of a knife that still clung to his coat. Dazed and bewildered, he drew it out, and, holding it gingerly, staggered back to Medbury.

Clinging to the life-lines, Drew told his story briefly, and as clearly as was possible in that shrieking gale, while Medbury turned the knife over and over in his hand.

"It's that damn' steward's," he said. "He's the one I threw out. I forgot him." His voice trailed off in the tumult of the storm, and Drew leaned forward to catch the words; then somehow he understood that the mate was asking about the steward.

"Damn' good thing," replied Medbury, and gently pushed him toward the companionway.

It must have been four bells when the second mate found his way to Medbury's side and told him that the captain wanted him.

"Don't give them any let-up," Medbury shouted in his ear; "and lash yourself fast. But don't give them any let-up."

He struggled aft, and put his hand on the captain's shoulder. In the light of the binnacle-lamp he could see that the old man's face was set and grim.

"Yes," he heard. The captain whirled the wheel, and then continued: "Yes; go aloft;[Pg 264] see if you can see the light on Culebra." He paused to shift the wheel, straightened up again, and went on: "These seas run—a little like shoaling water. I'd hate to run too far to the westward and fetch up on the shoals beyond Culebra. Bad enough as 'tis. Take a good look, and hurry back."

"All right, sir!" Medbury shouted, then made his way to the main-rigging, and went slowly and carefully up. The wind flattened him against the ratlines, so that it was with difficulty that he lifted arms and knees; and when the brig swung to port, he seemed to be clinging to the lower side of the rigging, so far did she roll down. "Fetlock-shrouds all the way up," he muttered to himself. When he was well above the obstructing lower topsail, he looked ahead.

Under him, near the vessel, the sea gleamed spectrally over its whole surface, but farther away it was black. The mist had lifted, and he had the impression, even in the darkness,[Pg 265] of a wide horizon-line; but no light was to be seen. He went upward again, till the crosstrees were just above him, and looked once more.

He gazed long, sweeping the whole line of the sea ahead slowly, pausing at each point, that he might not lose the flash. The strain brought the tears to his eyes, and he wiped them with his sleeve and looked again. Something in his dizzy altitude, in the task set him and its failure, impressed him more than anything had yet done, and he began to lose heart.

"Father went this way," he muttered, "and I guess it's good enough for me. He was a better man than I am. Poor Hetty!" He looked for the light again, giving all his thought to it. Then he sighed. "I wish to God," he went on, "that we'd let her be! She wouldn't have been here if we hadn't teased her about China. I wish she was there. This is no way for her to go—a girl like[Pg 266] her." Then slowly at last he descended to the deck.

At the wheel, Captain March was growing unutterably weary, and something like the same thoughts were passing through his mind.

"Lord," he said, "I haven't ever been much of a praying man, and I ain't going to begin now, when I can't shift for myself. I'd be ashamed. You know I've tried to do right. I ain't afraid of death, but I hate to lose the old boat. I've always had good luck, and I guess I've kind o' got in the way of thinking it was going to last. I'd like to have it. I rather expected to die at home, and be buried alongside of mother. She thought of that a good deal." Of his wife and daughter he would not trust himself to think.

He looked up as Medbury approached him, but turned his eyes away immediately. He saw that Culebra light had not been sighted.

[Pg 267]Medbury simply shook his head and stepped back, but the captain called him nearer.

"I guess it's too early," he said. "Go up again soon, and if we haven't made it then, we'll try to get a sounding. See if that steward left any cold tea below, will you?"

As Medbury went down the companionway and into the pantry, a figure came softly out of the girls' room and tiptoed across the cabin. It was Hetty. As she neared the pantry, the swinging floor tripped her and sent her flying into the room behind Medbury's back. She giggled hysterically as he turned with a start.

"I couldn't sleep," she said plaintively. "I waited for you; I thought you'd never come." She hesitated, laid her hand on his arm, and continued slowly: "Now I want you to tell me the truth—the truth. I'm[Pg 268] not a child. I can bear it. I know we are in great danger—isn't it so?"

"We've got a chance," he now explained. "It looks bad, I know, but we've got a chance. I guess we've got an even chance."

"We didn't think it would be like this when we left the harbor at home, did we?" she continued. "It was like a spring day, and the buds were getting red. I said the leaves would be full grown when we got back—I said so to mother." She choked back a sob.

"Don't, dear!" he pleaded. "Don't! You shall see them yet. You shall live to grow old among your trees, Hetty."

"But if I don't," she persisted, "and—anything happens, will you try to get to me? I don't want to go alone, shut up down here."

[Pg 269]"Yes," he answered solemnly; "I'll get to you. But we're going to pull through—really."

Then suddenly she flung her arms about his neck, pressed her cheek against his, and vanished.

When Medbury reached the deck he took the wheel while the captain drank a great draught of the clear, cold tea. Taking the wheel again, he said something that Medbury could not understand.

"Yes, sir," Medbury replied. "Didn't find it right away. That steward never did leave things where you could put your hand[Pg 270] right on them. He—" Medbury paused. He was about to say that it was the last of the steward's tea that the captain would ever drink, but changed his mind. "I won't trouble the old man to-night," he said to himself. "Morning will be time enough—if there is a morning."

The canvas screen above the taffrail had whipped itself free, and the great seas, in long ridges that seemed never to break, followed the vessel with vindictive hate. The gale beat the men down, the spray blinded them; now and then a rush of wind, coming with great fury, with a wailing cry that sprang upon them like Indians from ambush, pressed them onward along the rolling seas without motion other than the forward one. Then the wind, relaxing its hold, left the brig wallowing exhausted in the deep hollows, like a collapsing thing.

He went up deliberately, turning his eyes neither to right nor to left until he saw the crosstrees just overhead. Stopping, he thrust a leg between the ratlines to steady himself, and gazed ahead once more. It had grown lighter, and he could now plainly distinguish the blurred line where sky and water met. Suddenly, far ahead, he saw a little point of light grow out of the blackness of the night, flash for a moment, and then disappear. His heart leaped in exultation, but he waited, to be sure. Again it flashed and disappeared. Marking its position well, he hurried to the deck and aft.

Captain March made no reply; his face was as immobile as a figurehead. Whatever[Pg 272] exultation he may have felt in the triumph of his reckoning, he was never to show it.

By eight bells the light was abreast, and they had hauled up on their course past Sail Rock. The gale was sweeping down through the passage, with a threatening sea, and every bit of rigging roaring and piping to the tune of the road. Suddenly, out of the blackness on their port bow a dark shape loomed, and the rock stood up almost beside them. Without changing the course a hair, they drew near, passed under its lee, with the gale dropping for an instant and the staysails flapping, and overhead, from the rock, the sound of startled sea-birds crying in the night. Then the gale rushed down again, and sea and rigging roared once more.

[Pg 273]"Well, it's stirring," replied Medbury. He walked to the rail and scanned the sea with the glass. "Pity there isn't something more'n a 'bug light' on St. Thomas," he said to the captain as he walked over to his side. "We might skip right in before daybreak."

"By daybreak we'll not need St. Thomas light," he said dryly, and bent to the wheel again.

"The old pirate!" muttered Medbury. "He's chartered for Santa Cruz, and that's where he's going! There's five feet of water in the hold, and a tearing gale loose, and a worn-out, hopeless crew; but he's going to Santa Cruz! If the wind should flop around or fall, we'd go to the bottom; but it won't. It wouldn't have the cheek—not with him. Well!"

The wind hauled over the quarter, and fell slightly; gradually the sea grew pale, and[Pg 274] spars and sails took on more definite shape; and then all at once it was day, and they saw the sea whipped with foam, and dark masses of purplish-black clouds hanging low, with dashes of gold firing their edges in the east. St. Thomas had dropped behind them, and far ahead the cone of Santa Cruz, gray and misty under the darker clouds, was rising on the edge of the sea.

Day came on apace; the wind dropped a trifle more, but not until the harbor of Christiansted took shape, with the anchored ships lying thick in the roadstead, and the bright-hued little town clinging to the hillside above the water's edge, did the captain allow the girls on deck. As they ascended at last, white but happy, and looked out of the companionway, glancing eagerly about them, the gray, worn vessel, the dark, low-hanging clouds, the wind-swept sea, appalled them, and for a moment they could not speak.

"Eet iss not lak home," murmured the[Pg 275] Danish girl; "eet iss mos' sad and mos' desolate."

They were silent for a moment and abstracted, gazing with curious eyes at the land rising under the bow. Suddenly Miss Stromberg seized her companion's arm.

"Ah!" she cried, "doze flag—yonner!" She pointed where the red, white-crossed ensign of Denmark flapped straight out in the gale above the little white fort at the water's edge. "And op by doze tall tree," she went on eagerly, "iss ma gahden—wiz yellow wall, and doze red tiles beyon'. Now eet iss shuah-lee home."

Medbury, going forward, stopped a moment by the main-rigging, where Drew stood alone. The pumps were quiet as they made harbor, and the crew were forward. Drew[Pg 276] was watching them with curious eyes. He glanced up as Medbury drew near, and spoke.

"It was a beautiful fight," he said; then remembering their talk early on the voyage, he added: "Call it a case of brutality, if you like; but it seemed necessary."

"Man alive!" said Medbury, "they had been standing many hours at those pumps and working as they'd never worked before—with no hope. That's punishment enough, isn't it? They're tired now, and very humble, and, I guess, if the truth could be told, pretty thankful to me. It wasn't mutiny; it was a funk. They simply gave up, that's all.[Pg 277] But if the old man had done it, you wouldn't be looking into Christiansted roadstead this morning. There's a man for you!" His voice changed as he added: "And if it hadn't been for you, God knows where I'd be now. Over the rail somewhere, with the steward's pretty little trinket in my back. I haven't said much; but I guess you know I'm not going to forget it."

"They know he was swept overboard," the mate replied. "I guess they needn't know any more at present." Then he went forward.

Rolling heavily, low above the sea, white with salt, but with the speed of the gale in her rain-blackened sails, the brig flashed past the shipping, crowded with wondering sailors, and drove straight for the rocky beach where the cocoanut-palms came down to the shore, and on hot mornings the negro washer-women[Pg 278] lay their wet clothes upon the smooth rocks, and the roadstead resounds with the echoing beat of their wooden paddles. Then all at once Captain March's voice rang out, and with sails shaking in the wind the Henrietta C. March shot toward a narrow ribbon of sand on the shore, struck, rolled slowly, and with a long, grating sigh came safely to land.

An hour later, as Medbury walked aft, he mounted the steps to the poop-deck before he saw the flutter of Hetty's dress by the main-rigging. She was looking steadily out to sea.

"Here on this side, when you can see the town on the other!" he exclaimed. "Haven't you had enough of the sea?"

"It's always true—home and the old things," she said softly—"the things we've always known."

She dropped her hand to her side, and he caught it for an instant. Overhead there were widening patches of blue sky; the sea was taking on a softer hue. Behind them the tropic world glowed in beauty. On the beach little groups of negro women, in white[Pg 280] bandanas and bright-colored, wind-blown skirts, stood and watched the sailors aboard the brig, their shrill laughter and cries coming up softened by the gale, now rapidly falling. The pumps were going again.

"I don't understand it yet," he said at last, turning to her. "Just when I thought it was all over, suddenly it comes out right. I don't understand."

"You never will, you poor boy," she replied, smiling up into his face. Then suddenly her face grew grave, and she began to speak again: "It was only when I thought it was all over that I began to think. Then the storm came, and I saw how much it meant to me that you were near me, and I was almost sure that I had made a mistake. I think I wasn't quite sure until you made that dreadful picture yesterday of what it would[Pg 281] be for us to be merely friends. Then I knew."

"Well," he replied, in his bewilderment, "I am sure I shall never understand, as you say; but I do not care. It is enough to know that everything is right at last. And you are sure that you will not mind giving up China, Hetty, and the missionary work?"

"Yes," she said firmly; "I was almost ready to give that up three days ago—before I thought I cared for you, you know. I have thought many things in these three days. Sometimes, when I think of them, I feel a thousand years old, as Miss Stromberg says."

The door of the cabin below them opened, and they heard the sound of Drew's voice[Pg 282] and Miss Stromberg's laugh. She was patiently waiting until she could go ashore.

"I was beginning to think that he was going to stand in my way, Hetty," said Medbury, nodding toward the cabin.

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	PAGE
"There was a twinkle in Captain March's eyes"	Frontispiece
"The brig was sliding down the seas like a boy let loose from school"	63
"'You will need the patience,' she said"	113
"They heard him whistling for a wind"	141
"There came a 'smooth,' and the boat shot in"	195
"'Keep 'em going! Don't let 'em slack up a bit!'"	255

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