Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The Coast
have flattened us against the bottom of this hull in a little while.”
“I would have figgered it just t'other way,” stated Mr. Speed, humbly.
“Outside air, being fresh, ought nat'rally to rush in to fill the holes
we have breathed out of this air.”
Mayo was in no mood to lecture on natural phenomena. He investigated the
cut which had been made by the incautious mate and estimated, by what
his fingers told him, that the schooner's bottom planks were three
inches thick. He settled back on his haunches and gave a little thought
to the matter, and understood that he had a ticklish job ahead of him.
Those planks must be gouged around the complete square of the proposed
opening, so that the section might be driven out in one piece by a blow
from beneath. That section must give way wholly and instantly. They were
doomed if they made a half-job of it. In that pitchy blackness he had
only his fingers to guide him. That one little streak of light from the
open world without was tantalizing promise. On the other side of those
planks was God's limitless air. The poor creatures penned under that
hull were gasping and choking for want of that air. Mayo set bravely to
work, hammering at the chisel-head above him.
All were silent. They felt the initial languor of suffocation and knew
the peril which was threatening them.
“If there is anything I can do--” ventured Otie.
“There isn't!”
Captain Mayo felt the lack of oxygen most cruelly, because he was
working with all his might. Perspiration was streaming into his eyes, he
was panting like a running dog, his blows were losing force.
He found that Otie had partly cleared out the rib before that
too-willing helper had taken it into his head to knock a hole through
the planking. The rib must come away entirely! The tough oak resisted;
the chisel slipped; it was maddeningly slow work. But he finished the
task at last and began to gouge a channel in the planking close to the
other ribs. Torpor was wrapping its tentacles about him. He heard his
companions gasping for breath. Then, all at once, he felt a little pat
on his shoulder. He knew that tap for what it was, though she did not
speak to him; it was the girl's reassuring touch. It comforted him to be
told in that manner that she was keeping up her courage in the horrible
situation. He beveled the planks as deeply as he dared, and made his cut
around three sides of his square. He was forced to stop for a moment and
lay prostrate, his face on the lumber.
“Take that saw, one of you, and chunk off a few short lengths of plank,”
he whispered, hoarsely. The rasp of the hand-saw informed him that he
had been obeyed.
He held his eyes wide open with effort as he lay there in the darkness.
Then he struggled up and went at his task once more. Queerly colored
flames were shooting before his straining eyes. He toiled in partial
delirium, and it seemed to him that he was looking again at the
phantasmagoria of the Coston lights on the fog when the yachtsmen were
serenading the girl of the Polly. He found himself muttering, keeping
time to his chisel-blows:
“Our Polly O,
O'er the sea you go--”
In all the human emotions there is no more maddening and soul-flaying
terror than the fear of being shut in, which wise men call
claustrophobia. Mayo had been a man of the open--of wide horizons,
drinking from the fount of all the air under the heavens. This hideous
confinement was demoralizing his reason. He wanted to throw down his
hammer and chisel and scream and kick and throw himself up against the
penning planks. On the other side was air--the open! There was still one
side of the square to do.
Again that comforting little hand touched his shoulder and he was
spurred by the thought that the girl was still courageous and had faith
in him. He groaned and kept on.
Lapse of time ceased to have significance. Every now and then the hammer
slipped and bruised his hand cruelly. But he did not feel the hurt. Both
tools wavered in his grasp. He struck a desperate--a despairing blow and
the hammer and chisel dropped. He knew that he had finished the fourth
side. He fell across Polly Candage's lap and she helped him to his
knees.
“I'm done, men,” he gasped. “All together with those joists! Strike
together! Right above my head.”
He heard the skipper count one--two--three. He heard the concerted blow.
The planks did not give way.
“We don't seem to have no strength left,” explained the mate, in hoarse
tones.
They struck again, but irregularly.
“It's our lives--our lives, men!” cried Mayo. “Ram it to her!”
“Here's one for you, Captain Mayo,” said Candage, and he thrust a length
of plank into the groping hands.
“Make it together, this time--together!” commanded Mayo. “Hard--one,
two, three!”
They drove their battering-rams up against the prisoning roof. Fury and
despair were behind their blow.
The glory of light flooded into their blinking eyes.
The section had given way!
Mayo went first and he snapped out with almost the violence of a cork
popping from a bottle. He felt the rush of the imprisoned air past him
as he emerged. Instantly he turned and thrust down his hands and pulled
the girl up into the open and the others followed, the lumber pushing
under their feet.
It seemed to Captain Mayo, after those few frenzied moments of escape,
that he had awakened from a nightmare; he found himself clinging to the
schooner's barnacled keel, his arm holding Polly Candage from sliding
down over the slimy bottom into the sea.
“Good jeero! We've been in there all night,” bawled Captain Candage. He
lay sprawled on the bottom of the Polly, his hornbeam hands clutching
the keel, his face upraised wonderingly to the skies that were flooded
with the glory of the morning. Otie and Dolph were beside him, mouths
open, gulping in draughts of the air as if they were fish freshly drawn
from the ocean depths.
There was a long silence after the skipper's ejaculation.
Thoughts, rather than words, fitted that sacred moment of their
salvation.
The five persons who lay there on the bottom of the schooner stared at
the sun in its cloudless sky and gazed off across the sea whose blue was
shrouded by the golden haze of a perfect summer's day. Only a lazy roll
was left of the sudden turbulence of the night before. A listless breeze
with a fresh tang of salt in it lapped the surface of the long,
slow surges, and the facets of the ripples flashed back the sunlight
cheerily.
Captain Candage pulled himself to the keel, sat upon it, and found
speech in faltering manner.
“I ain't a member of no church, never having felt the need of j'ining,
and not being handy where I could tend out. But I ain't ashamed to say
here, before witnesses, that I have just been telling God, as best I
know how, hoping He'll excuse me if I 'ain't used the sanctimonious way,
that I'm going to be a different man after this--different and better,
according to my best lights.”
“I believe you have spoken for all of us, Captain Can-dage,” said Mayo,
earnestly. “I thank you!”
They all perceived that the _Polly_ had made offing at a lively pace
during her wild gallop under the impetus of the easterly.
Mayo balanced himself on the keel and took a long survey of the horizon.
In one place a thread of blue, almost as delicate as the tracery of a
vein on a girl's arm, suggested shore line. But without a glass he was
not sure. He saw no sign of any other craft; the storm had driven all
coasters to harbor--and there was not wind enough as yet to help them
out to sea again. But he did not worry; he was sure that something,
some yacht or sea-wagon, would come rolling up over the rim of the ocean
before long. The faint breeze which fanned their faces was from the
southwest, and that fact promised wind enough to invite shipping to
spread canvas.
Only the oval of the schooner's broad bilge showed above water, and the
old Polly was so flat and tubby that their floating islet afforded only
scant freeboard.
Mayo shoved his arm down into the hole through which they had escaped.
After the air had been forced out the lumber was within reach from the
schooner's bottom. He fumbled about and found the ax. Some of the short
bits of lumber which they had used as battering-rams were in the jaws
of the hole. He busied himself with hewing these ends of planks into big
wedges and he drove them into cracks between the planks near the keel.
“It may come to be a bit sloppy when this sou'wester gets its gait on,”
he suggested to the skipper. “We'll have something to hang on to.”
Captain Candage's first thankfulness had shown a radiant gloss. But
he was a sailorman, he was cautious, he was naturally apprehensive
regarding all matters of the sea, and that gloss was now dulled a bit by
his second thought.
“We may have to hang on to something longer 'n we reckon on. We're too
far off for the coasters and too far in for the big fellers. And unless
something comes pretty clost to us we can't be seen no more 'n as if we
was mussels on a tide reef. We'd ought to have something to stick up.”
“If we could only work out one of those long joists it would make a
little show.” Captain Mayo shoved his arm down the hole again. “But they
are wedged across too solidly.”
“I think there's a piece of lumber floating over there,” cried the girl.
She was clinging to one of the wedges, and the composure which she felt,
or had assumed, stirred Mayo's admiration. The plump hand which she held
against her forehead to shield her eyes did not tremble. From the little
Dutch cap, under the edge of which stray locks peeped, down over her
attire to her toes, she seemed to be still trim and trig, in spite of
her experiences below in the darkness and the wet. With a sort of mild
interest in her, he reflected that her up-country beau would be very
properly proud of her if he could see her there on that schooner's keel.
“What a picture you would make, Miss Candage, just as you are!” he
blurted. She took down her hand, and the look she gave him did not
encourage compliments. “Just as you are, and call it 'The Wreck,'”
he added.
“Do I look as badly as all that, Captain Mayo?”
“You look--” he expostulated, and hesitated, for her gaze was distinctly
not reassuring.
“Don't tell me, please, how I look. I'm thankful that I have no mirror.
Isn't that a piece of lumber?” she inquired, crisply, putting a stop on
further personalities. “Wait! It's down in a hollow just now.”
The sea lifted it again immediately. Mayo saw that it was a long
strip of scantling, undoubtedly from the deckload that the _Polly_
had jettisoned when she was tripped. It lay to windward, and that fact
promised its recovery; but how was the tide? Mayo squinted at the sun,
did a moment's quick reckoning from the tide time of the day before, and
smiled.
“We'll get that, Miss Candage. She's coming this way.”
Watching it, seeing it lift and sink, waiting for it, helped to pass the
time. Then at last it came alongside, and he crawled cautiously down the
curve of the bilge and secured it. After he had braced it in the hole
in the schooner's bottom with the help of Mr. Speed, the girl gave him a
crumpled wad of cloth when he turned from his task.
“It's the rest of my petticoat. You may as well have it,” she explained,
a pretty touch of pink confusion in her cheeks.
Mr. Speed boosted Mayo and the young man attached the cloth to the
scantling and flung their banner to the breeze. Then there was not much
to do except to wait, everlastingly squinting across the bright sea to
the horizon's edge.
X ~ HOSPITALITY, PER JULIUS MARSTON
Hoo--oo--rah; and up she rises!
Hoo--oo--rah! and up she rises!
Early in the morning.
What shall we do with a saucy sailor?