Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The Coast
compass and stand there. You may hear a little tongue-clattering for
a few seconds. There'll be a little cussing, maybe, but you won't be
cussed, of course. You stand right there, calm and cool, never batting
an eyelid. And then it will happen, and when it does happen it will be a
surprise-party all right.”
“It's wrecking a seven-thousand-ton passenger-steamer in the night!”
mourned the general manager.
“It isn't! It's putting her into a safe cradle.”
“But at this speed!”
“That chap in the pilot-house is no fool. He'll get his hint in time to
save her from real damage. You needn't worry!”
Fogg opened his traveling-bag and lifted out a strip of metal. He
handled it as gingerly as if it were a reptile, and he looked at it with
an air as if he feared it would bite him.
“That's the little joker,” said Burkett. “About two points deviation by
local attraction will do the business!”
“I'm tempted to throw it overboard and call it all off, Burkett. I have
put through a good many deals in my life in the big game, but this looks
almost too raw. I can't help it! I feel a hunch as if something was
going to miscue.”
“I've got no more to say, governor.”
“My crowd doesn't ask questions of me, but they expect results. If I
don't do it, I suppose I'll kick myself in the morning.” He cocked up
his ear and listened to the bawling of the liner's great whistle. “But
it seems different in the night.”
“You ain't leaving any tracks,” encouraged Burkett. “And this being his
first run makes it more plausible. You're here all naturally, yourself.
It might seem rather queer if you made another trip. It's his first run
on her, I remind you. If he makes a slip-up it won't surprise the wise
guys-a mite.”
“It seems to be all set--I've got to admit it. By gad, Burkett, I have
always put a thing through when I've started on it! That's why they
call in the little Fogg boy. I'd rather apologize to my conscience than
to--Well, never mind who he is.” He tucked the strip of metal into his
inside coat pocket and buttoned the coat. “Blast it! nothing that's very
bad can happen in this calm sea--and that last life-boat drill went off
fine. Here goes!” declared Fogg, with desperate emphasis.
“That's the boy!” declared Burkett, encouraged to familiarity by their
association in mischief.
The general manager found the night black when he edged his way along
the wet deck to the pilot-house. The steamer's lights made blurred
patches in the fog. Now she seemed to have the sea to herself; there
were no answering whistles.
“I'm back again, Captain Mayo,” he said, as he closed the door against
the night. “I hope I won't bother you folks here. I'll stay out from
underfoot.” He sat down on a transom at the extreme rear of the house
and smoked his cigar with nervous vehemence.
Another quartermaster succeeded the man at the wheel, the mate made his
notations of dead reckoning and pricked the chart, the usual routine was
proceeded with. Mayo continued at the window, head out-thrust, except
when he glanced at chart or compass or noted the dials which marked the
screws' revolutions.
Every now and then he put his ear to the submarine-signal receiver.
At last he heard the faint, far throb of the Sow and Pigs submarine
bell--seven strokes, with the four seconds' interval, then the seven
strokes repeated.
A bit later he got, sweet and low as an elfland horn, the lightship's
chime whistle. It was dead ahead, which was not exactly to his
calculation. The tide set had served stronger than he had reckoned. He
ordered the helmsman to ease her off a half-point, in order to make safe
offing for the turn into Vineyard Sound.
Well up in the sound the bell of Tarpaulin Cove reassured him, and after
a time he heard the unmistakable blast of the great reed horn of Nobska
uttering its triple hoot like a giant owl perched somewhere in the
mists.
“Nobska,” said the mate. “We are certainly coming on, sir.”
“Nobly,” agreed Captain Mayo, allowing himself a moment of jubilation,
even though the dreaded shoals were ahead.
“Are you going to keep this speed across the shoals, Captain Mayo?”
asked the general manager, displaying real deference.
“No, sir!” stated the captain with decision, bracing himself to give
Mr. Fogg a sharp word or two if that gentleman advanced any more of his
“business man's reasons” for speed. “It would not be showing due care.”
“I'm glad to hear you say that,” affirmed Mr. Fogg, heartily. “It may
be a little out of place, right now, but I want you to know that I feel
that I have picked out just the right man to command this ship. I'm glad
of a chance to say this where your mates can hear me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fogg,” returned the young man, gratefully. “This is
a soul-racking job, and I'm glad you are here to see what we are up
against. I don't feel that we'll be wasting much time in crossing the
shoals if we go carefully. We can let her out after we swing east of
Monomoy. She's a grand old packet.”
In the gloom Fogg ran his fingers gingerly over the outside of his coat
to make sure that the strip of metal was in its place.
There was silence in the pilot-house after that. Ahead there was
ticklish navigation. There were the narrow slues, the crowding shoals,
the blind turns of Nantucket Sound, dreaded in all weathers, but a
mariner's horror in a fog.
Nobska's clarion call drew slowly abeam to port, and after due lapse
of time West Chop's steam-whistle lifted its guiding voice in the mists
ahead.
“Better use the pelorus and be careful about West Chop's bearing after
we pass her, Mr. Bangs,” Captain Mayo warned his first mate.
As a sailor well knows, the bearing of West Chop gives the compass
direction for passage between the shoals known as Hedge Fence and Squash
Meadow--a ten-mile run to Cross Rip Lightship. In a fog it is vitally
important to have West Chop exact to the eighth of a point.
Fogg was glad that he was alone where he sat. He trembled so violently
that he set an unlighted cigar between his teeth to keep them from
rattling together.
The mate was outlined against the window, his eyes on the instrument,
his ear cocked. Every half-minute West Chop's whistle hooted.
“Right, sir!” the mate reported at last, speaking briskly. “I make it
west by nothe, five-eighths nothe.”
Fogg rose and half staggered forward, taking a position just to the left
of the wheel and compass.
“East by south, five-eighths south,” the captain directed the helmsman.
“Careful attention, sir. Tide is flood, four knots. Make the course
good!”
The quartermaster repeated and twirled his wheel for the usual number of
revolutions to allow a three-points change.
Captain Mayo stepped back and glanced at the compass to make certain
that his helmsman was finding his course properly. “What in tophet's
name is the matter with you, man?” he shouted. “Bring this ship around!
Bring her around!” He grabbed the wheel and spun it. “You're slower than
the devil drawing molasses,” raged Mayo, forgetting his dignity.
“She must have yawed,” protested the man. “I had her on her course, sir.
I supposed I had her over.”
“You are not to suppose. You are to keep your eyes on that compass card
and move quicker when I give an order.”
The helmsman's eyes bulged as he stared at the compass. While he
had winked his eyes, so it seemed to him, the true course had fairly
straddled away from the lubber line.
In his frantic haste Captain Mayo put her over too far. He helped
the man set her on the right course. Then he signaled half speed. The
devious and the narrow paths were ahead of them..
“That's an almighty funny jump the old dame made then,” pondered the
quartermaster. But he was too well trained to argue with a captain. He
accepted the fault as his own, and now that she was on her course, he
held her there doggedly.
Even the _Montana's_ half speed was a respectable gait, and the silent
crew in her pilot-house could hear the sea lathering along her sides.
“What do you make of that, Mr. Bangs?” the captain asked, after a
prolonged period of listening.
“Bell, sir!”
“But the only bell in that direction would be on Hedge Fence Lightship
in case her whistle has been disabled.”
“Sounds to me like a vessel at anchor.”
“But it's right in the fairway.” Captain Mayo convinced himself by a
glance at the compass. “No craft would drop her hook in the fairway.
That's no bell on the Hedge Fence,” reflected the captain. “It's a
schooner's bell. But sound often gets freaky in a fog. We're on our
course to the fraction, and we've got to keep going!”
And after a moment the bell ceased its clangor. It was a distant sound,
and its location was indefinite even to a sharp ear.
“It strikes me that sounds in general are a little warded all of a
sudden,” said the captain to his mate. “I'll swear that I can hear Hedge
Fence's five-second blasts now. But there she howls off the starboard
bow. The clouds must be giving us an echo. We've got to leave it to the
compass.”
A skilful mariner is careful about forsaking the steady finger of a
proved compass in order to chase sounds around the corner in foggy
weather. He understands that air strata raise the dickens with
whistle-blasts. There are zones of silence--there is divergence of
sound.
Fogg held his position, his legs braced, and nobody paid any especial
attention to him. They in the pilothouse were too busy with other
affairs.
There is one sound in thick weather that tells a navigator much. It is
the echo of his own whistle.
The big steamer was hoarsely hooting her way.
Suddenly there was a sound which fairly flew up and hit Captain Mayo
in the face. It was an echo. It was the sound of the _Montana's_
whistle-blast flung back at him from some object so near at hand that
there was barely a clock-tick between whistle and echo.
The captain yelped a great oath and yanked his bell-pulls furiously.
“That echo came from a schooner's sails,” he shouted.
Then, dead ahead, clanged her bell. The next instant, plunging along
at least eight miles an hour, in spite of engines clawing at full speed
astern, the towering bow smashed into the obstacle in her path.
It was a mighty shock which sent a tremor from stem to stern of the
great fabric. They saw that they hit her--a three-masted schooner at
anchor, with her sails set, dingy canvas wet and idle in the foggy,
breathless night. But their impact against her was almost as if they had
hit a pier. The collision sent them reeling about the pilot-house. As
they drove past they saw her go down, her stern a splintered mass of
wreckage, in which men were frantically struggling.
“That's a granite-lugger! See her go down, like a stone!” gasped Mate
Bangs. “My God! What do you suppose she has done to us forward?”
“Get there. Get there!” roared Captain Mayo. “Get there and report,
sir!”
But before the chief mate was half-way down the ladder on his way
the wailing voice of the lookout reported disaster. “Hole under the
water-line forward,” he cried.
“There are men in the water back there, sir,” said a quartermaster.
“We're making water fast in the forward compartment,” came a voice
through the speaking-tube.
Already they in the pilot-house could hear the ululation of women in the
depths of the ship, and then the husky clamor of the many voices of men
drowned the shriller cries.
Captain Mayo had seen the survivors from the schooner struggling in the
water. But he rang for full speed ahead and ordered the quartermaster to
aim her into the north, knowing that land lay in that direction.
“Eight hundred lives on my shoulders and a hole in her,” he told
himself, while all his world of hope and ambition seemed rocking to
ruin. “I can't wait to pick up those poor devils.”