Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The Coast
In a few minutes--in so few minutes that all his calculations as to his
location were upset--the _Montana_ plowed herself to a shuddering halt
on a shoal, her bow lifting slightly. And when the engines were stopped
she rested there, sturdily upright, steady as an island. But in her
saloon the men and women who fought and screamed and cursed, beating to
and fro in windrows of humanity like waves in a cavern, were convinced
that the shuddering shock had signaled the doom of the vessel.
Half-dressed men, still dizzy with sleep, confused by dreams which
blended with the terrible reality, trampled the helpless underfoot,
seeking exit from the saloon.
The hideous uproar which announced panic was a loud call to the master
of the vessel. He understood what havoc might be wrought by the brutal
senselessness of the struggle. He ran from the pilot-house, stepping on
the feet of the general manager, who was stumbling about in bewildered
fashion.
“Call all the crew to stations and guard the exits,” Captain Mayo
commanded the second mate.
On his precipitate way to the saloon the captain passed the room of the
wireless operator, and the tense crackle of the spark told him that the
SOS signal was winging its beseeching flight through the night.
Three men, half dressed, with life-preservers buckled on in hit-or-miss
fashion, met him on the deck, dodged his angry clutch, and leaped over
the rail into the sea, yelling with all the power of their lungs.
A quartermaster was at the captain's heels.
“Get over a life-boat on each side and attend to those idiots!” roared
Mayo.
He thrust his way into a crowded corridor, beating frantic men back with
his fists, adjuring, assuring, appealing, threatening. He mounted upon a
chair in the saloon. He fairly outbellowed the rest of them. Men of the
sea are trained to shout against the tempest.
“You are safe! Keep quiet! Sit down! This steamer is ashore on a
sand-bank. She's as solid as Bunker Hill.” He shouted these assurances
over and over.
They began to look at him, to pay heed to him. His uniform marked his
identity.
“You lie!” screamed an excited man. “We're out to sea! We're sinking!
Where are your life-boats?”
Bedlam began again. Like the fool who shouts “Fire!” in a throng, this
brainless individual revived all the fears of the frenzied passengers.
Mayo realized that heroic action was necessary. He leaped down from the
chair, seized the man who had shouted, and beat the fellow's face with
the flat of his hard hand.
That scene of conflict was startling enough to serve as a real jolt to
their attention. They hushed their cries; they looked on, impressed,
cowed.
“If there's any other man in this crowd who wants to tell me I'm a liar,
let him stand out and say so,” shouted Captain Mayo. “You're making
fools of yourselves. There's no danger.”
He released the pallid and trembling man of whom he had made an example
and stepped on to a chair. He put up his hand, dominating them until he
had secured absolute silence.
“You--you--you!” he said, crisply, darting finger here and there,
pointing out individuals. “You seem to have more level heads than the
rest, you men! Go forward where the man is casting the lead. Cast the
lead yourselves. Come back here and report to these passengers, as their
committee. I'm telling you the truth. There's no water under us to speak
of.” He remained in the saloon until his committee returned.
The man who reported looked a bit sheepish. “The captain is right,
ladies and gentlemen. We could even see the sand where she has plowed it
up--they've got lanterns over the rail. There's no danger.”
A steward trotted to Captain Mayo and handed him a slip of paper. The
captain read the message and shook the paper in the faces of the throng.
“The revenue cutter _Acushnet_ has our wireless call and is starting,
and the _Itasca_ will follow. I advise you to go to bed and go to sleep.
You're perfectly, absolutely safe. You will be transferred when it's
daylight. Now be men and women!”
He hurried out on deck. His men were hoisting aboard the three dripping,
sputtering passengers who had run amuck.
“And those same men would look after a runaway horse and sneer that he
didn't have any brains,” remarked Captain Mayo, disgustedly.
For the next half-hour he was a busy man. He investigated the
_Montana's_ wound, first of all. He found her flooded forward--her nose
anchored into the sand with a rock-of-ages solidity.
His heart sank when he realized what her plight meant from the wrecking
and salvage viewpoint. In those shifting sands, winnowed constantly by
the rushing currents of the sound, digging her out might be a Gargantuan
task, working her free a hopeless undertaking.
His tour of investigation showed him that except for her smashed bow
the steamer was intact. Her helplessness there in the sand was the more
pitiable on that account.
He had not begun to take account of stock of his own responsibility for
this disaster. The whirl of events had been too dizzying. As master of
the ship he would be held to account for her mishap. But to what extent
had he been negligent? He could not figure it out. He realized that
excitement plays strange pranks with a man's consciousness of linked
events or of the passage of time. He could not understand why the
steamer piled up so quickly after the collision. According to his ample
knowledge of the shoals, he had been on his true course and well off the
dangerous shallows.
His first mate met him amidship. “I sent off one of our life-boats, sir.
Told 'em to go back and hunt for the men we saw in the water. They found
two. Others seem to be gone.”
“I'm glad you thought of it, Mr. Bangs. I ought to have attended to it,
myself.”
“You had enough on your hands, sir, as it was. She was the _Lucretia
M. Warren_, with granite from Vinal-haven. That's what gave us such an
awful tunk.”
“Who are the men?”
“Mate and a sailor. They've had some hot drinks, and are coming along
all right.”
“We'll have a word with them, Mr. Bangs.”
The survivors of the _Warren_ were forward in the crew's quarters, and
they were still dazed. They had not recovered from their fright; they
were sullen.
“I'm sorry, men! Sailor to sailor, you know what I mean if I don't say
any more. It's bad business on both sides. But what were you doing in
the fairway?”
“We wa'n't in the fairway,” protested a grizzled man, evidently the
mate. He was uneasy in his borrowed clothes--he had surrendered his own
garments to a pantryman who had volunteered to dry them.
“You must have been,” insisted Captain Mayo.
“I know we was all of two miles north of the regular course. I 'ain't
sailed across these shoals for thirty years not to know soundings when
I make 'em myself. Furthermore, she'll speak for herself, where she's
sunk.”
The captain could not gainsay that dictum.
The mate scowled at the young man.
“I've got a question of my own. What ye doing, yourself, all of two
miles out of your course, whanging along, tooting your old whistle as
if you owned the sea and had rollers under you to go across dry ground
with, too?”
“I was not two miles out of my course,” protested the captain, and yet
the sickening feeling came to him that there had been some dreadful
error, somewhere, somehow.
“When they put these steamers into the hands of real men instead of
having dudes and kids run 'em, then shipping will stand a fair show on
this coast,” declared the mate, casting a disparaging glance at Mayo's
new uniform. “It was my watch on deck, and I know what I'm talking
about. You came belting along straight at us, two points out of your
course, and I thought the fog was playing tricks, and I didn't believe
my own ears. You have drowned my captain and four honest men. When I
stand up in court they'll get the straight facts from me, I can tell you
that. And they tell me it's your first trip. I might have knowed it
was some greenhorn, when I heard you coming two points off your course.
You'd better take off them clothes. I reckon you've made your _last_
trip, too!”
It was the querulous railing of a man who had been near death; it
was the everlasting grouch of the sailing-man against the lordly
steamboater. Mayo had no heart for rebuke or retort. What had happened
to him, anyway? This old schooner man seemed to know exactly what he was
talking about.
“If you don't believe what I'm telling you, go out on deck and see if
you can't hear the Hedge Fence whistle,” advised the mate, sourly. “If
she don't bear south of east I'll eat that suit they're drying out for
me. And that will show you that you're two miles to the norrard of where
you ought to be.”
On his way to the pilot-house Captain Mayo did hear the hollow voice
of the distant whistle, with its double blast and its long interval
of silence. The sound came from abaft his beam and his disquietude
increased.
Then the acute realization was forced in upon him that he had the
general manager of the line to face. The captain had not caught sight
of his superior during the excitement; he wondered now why Mr. Fogg had
effaced himself so carefully.
The red coal of a cigar glowed in a corner of the pilothouse. From that
corner came curt inquiry: “Well, Captain Mayo, what have you got to say
about this?”
“I think I'll do my talking after I have had daylight on the
proposition, sir.”
“Don't you have any idea how you happened to be off your course so far?”
asked Fogg, his anxiety noticeable in his tones.
“How do you know I was off my course?”
“Well--er--why, well, you wouldn't be aground, would you, if you hadn't
lost your way?”
“I didn't lose my way, Mr. Fogg.”
“What did happen, then?”
“That's for me to find out.”
“I'm not going to say anything to you yet, Captain Mayo. It's too
sudden--too big a blow. It's going to paralyze the Vose line.” Mr. Fogg
said this briskly, as if he were passing small talk on the weather.
“I'm thankful that you're taking the thing so calmly, sir. I've been
dreading to meet you.”
“Oh--a business man in these days can't allow himself to fly to pieces
over setbacks. Optimism is half the battle.”
But Mayo, sitting there in that dark pilot-house for the rest of the
night, staring out into the blank wall of the fog and surveying the
wreck of his hopes, was decidedly not optimistic.
XXI ~ BITTER PROOF BY MORNING LIGHT
Bad news, bad news to our captain came
That grieved him very sore;
But when he knew that all of it was true,
It grieved him ten time more,
Brave boys!
It grieved him ten times more!
--Cold Greenland.
Morning brought to him neither cheer nor counsel. The winds swept the
fog off the seas, and the brightness of the sunshine only mocked the
gloom of Captain Mayo's thoughts.
He was most unmistakably far off his course. He took his bearings
carefully, and he groped through his memory and his experience for
reasons which would explain how he came to be away up there on Hedge
Fence. Two of the masts of the sunken stone-schooner showed above the
sea, two depressing monuments of disaster. He took further bearings and
tested his compass with minute care. So far as he could determine it was
correct to the dot.
It was a busy forenoon for all on board the steamer. The revenue cutters
took off the passengers. Representatives of the underwriters came out
from Wood's Hole on a tug. The huge _Montana_, set solidly into its bed
of sand, loomed against the sky, mute witness of somebody's inefficiency
or mistake.
Late in the day Captain Mayo and General-Manager Fogg locked themselves
in the captain's cabin to have it out.
When the master had finished his statement Mr. Fogg flicked the ash from