Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The Coast
“Are you letting a nigger--and a crazy one at that--decide the biggest
thing in my life?” raged Bradish.
“I know what I'm doing,” Captain Downs assured him. But the skipper was
manifestly amazed by the expression he saw on Mayo's face.
“I won't stand for it! Here, you!” Bradish rushed across the room and
intercepted Mayo.
“Come away from that man!” commanded the skipper.
But Bradish was not in a mood to obey authority. “There's something
behind this and I propose to be let in on it! Stop, you!” He pushed
Mayo back, but the latter's face did not change its expression of dull,
blank, utter despair which saw not and heard not. Mayo recovered himself
and came on again, looking into vacancy.
“If you have a grudge against me, by the gods, I'll wake you up and make
you explain it!” shouted Bradish. He drew back his arm and drove a quick
punch squarely against the expressionless face. The blow came with a
lurch of the vessel and Mayo fell flat on his back. He went down as
stiffly as he had walked, with as little effort to save himself as a
store dummy would have made.
But he was another man when he came upon his feet.
Bradish had awakened him!
The master of the _Alden_ hurried around the table, roaring oaths, and
tried to get between them, but he was an unwieldy man on his short legs.
Before he was in arm's-length they were at each other, dodging here and
there.
Bradish was no shrimp of an adversary; he was taller than his
antagonist, and handled his fists like a man who had been trained as an
amateur boxer.
They fought up and down the cabin, battering each other's face.
The indignant master threatened them with an upraised chair, tried to
strike down their hands with it, but they were in no mood to mind a
mediator. They fought like maddened cats, banging against the cabin
walls, whirling in a crazy rigadoon to find an opening for their fists;
Captain Downs was not nimble enough to catch them. Uttering awful
profanity, he threatened to shoot both of them and rushed into the main
saloon, unlocking the door.
“I'm coming back with a gun!” he promised. But the fight ended suddenly
in a wrestling trick.
Mayo closed in, got Bradish's right hand in a grip, and doubled the arm
behind his adversary's back. Then he tripped the city man and laid
him backward over the table and against its edge with a violence that
brought a yell of pain and made Bradish limp and passive. Mayo held him
there.
“My grudge, eh? My grudge!” the victor panted. “Because you wouldn't
tell me how the sneaks ruined me? No! The girl isn't here now. I'll tell
you! It's because you stole her self-respect and her good name, and it
makes you too dirty a dog to be her husband!”
He picked up Bradish and threw him on the floor. When he turned he saw
the girl's white, agonized, frightened face at the crack of the saloon
door.
“Captain Downs!” she shrieked, “that negro is killing him. He's killing
Ralph!”
The victor turned his back on her and lurched around the table on his
way out. He stroked blood from his face with his palm, and was glad that
she had not recognized him; and yet, her failure to do so, even though
he was such a pitiable figure of the man she had known, was one more
slash of the whip of anguish across his raw soul. For a moment they had
stood there, face to face, and only blank unrecognition greeted him; it
made this horrible contretemps seem all the more unreal.
Mayo did not pause to listen to the ravings of Captain Downs, who
came thrusting past her. Dizzy, bleeding, half blind, he rushed up the
forward companionway and went into the black night on deck.
The mate was bawling for all hands to shorten sail, and Mayo took his
place with the toilers, who were manning sheets and downhauls.
XXIII ~ THE MONSTER THAT SLIPPED ITS LEASH
And there Captain Kirby proved a coward at last,
And he played at bo-peep behind the mainmast,
And there they did stand, boys, and shiver and shake,
For fear that that terror their lives it would take.
--Admiral Benbow.
Rain came with the wind, and the weather settled into a sullen, driving,
summer easterly.
Late summer regularly furnishes one of those storms to the Atlantic
coast, a recrudescence of the wintry gales, a trial run of the elements,
a sort of inter-equinoctial testing out so that Eurus may be sure that
his bellows is in working condition.
Such a storm rarely gives warning ahead that it is to be severe. It
seems to be a meteorological prank in order to catch mariners napping.
At midnight the _Alden_ was plunging into creaming seas, her five masts
thrummed by the blast. With five thousand tons of coal weighting her,
she wallowed like a water-soaked log.
Mayo, who was roused from his hideous agony of soul at four bells,
morning, to go on deck for his watch, ventured as near the engine-room
door as he dared, for the rain was soaking his meager garments and
the red glow from within was grateful. The ship's pump was clanking, a
circumstance in no way alarming, because the huge schooners of the coal
trade are racked and wrenched in rough water.
The second mate came to the engine-room, lugging the sounding-rod to the
light in order to examine the smear on its freshly chalked length.
He tossed it out on deck with a grunt of satisfaction. “Nothing to
hurt!” he said to the engineer. “However, I'd rather be inside the capes
in this blow. The old skimmer ain't what she used to be. Johnson, do
you know that this schooner is all of two feet longer when she is loaded
than when she is light?”
“I knew she was hogged, but I didn't know it was as bad as that.”
“I put the lead-line on her before she went into the coal-dock this
trip, and I measured her again in the stream yesterday. With a cargo
she just humps right up like a monkey bound for war. That's the way with
these five-masters! They get such a racking they go wrong before the
owners realize.”
“They'll never build any more, and I don't suppose they want to spend
much money on the old ones,” suggested the engineer.
“Naturally not, when they ain't paying dividends as it is.” He stepped
to the weather rail and sniffed. “I reckon the old man will be dropping
the killick before long,” he said.
Mayo knew something of the methods of schooner masters and was not
surprised by the last remark.
In the gallant old days, when it was the custom to thrash out a blow,
the later plan of anchoring a big craft in the high seas off the
Delaware coast, with Europe for a lee, would have been viewed with a
certain amount of horror by a captain.
But the modern skipper figures that there's less wear and tear if he
anchors and rides it out. To be sure, it's no sort of a place for a
squeamish person, aboard a loaded schooner whose mudhook clutches
bottom while the sea flings her about, but the masters and crews of
coal-luggers are not squeamish.
Mayo, glancing aft, saw two men coming forward slowly, stopping at
regular intervals. The light of a lantern played upon their dripping
oilskins. When they arrived at the break of the main-deck, near the
forward house, he recognized Captain Downs and the first mate. The
second mate stepped out and replied to the captain's hail.
“Bring a maul and some more wedges!” commanded the master.
“_Drusilla_ is getting her back up some more,” commented the second
mate, starting for the storeroom. “I don't blame her much. This is no
place for an old lady, out here to-night.” He ordered Mayo to accompany
him.
In a few moments they reported to the captain, the mate carrying the
two-headed maul and the young man bearing an armful of wedges.
Captain Downs bestowed on Mayo about the same attention he would have
allowed to a galley cockroach. He pointed to a gap in the rail.
“There--drive one in there,” he told the mate. “Let that nigger hold the
wedge.” There was rancor in his voice--baleful hostility shone in his
snapping eyes; no captain tolerates disobedience at sea, and Mayo had
disregarded all discipline in the cabin.
The young man kneeled and performed the service and followed the party
dutifully when they moved on to the next gap.
The pitching schooner groaned and grunted and squalled in all her
fabric.
Every angle joint was working--yawing open and closing with dull
grindings as the vessel rolled and plunged.
“By goofer, she's gritting her teeth in good shape!” commented the first
mate.
“She ought to have been stiffened a year ago, when she first began to
loosen and work!” declared Captain Downs. His anxiety stirred both his
temper and his tongue. “I was willing to have my sixteenth into her
assessed for repairs, but a stockholder don't have to go to sea! I wish
I had an excursion party of owners aboard here now.”
“When these old critters once get loose enough to play they rattle to
pieces mighty fast,” said the mate. “But this is nothing specially bad.”
“Find out what we've got under us,” snapped Captain Downs. The wedges
had been driven. “Let this nigger carry the lead for'ard!”
It was a difficult task in the night, because the leadline had to be
passed from the quarter-deck to the cathead outside the shrouds; the
rails and deck were slippery. Plainly, Captain Downs was proposing to
show Mayo “a thing or two.”
He let go the lead at command, and heard the man on the quarter-deck,
catching the line when it swung into a perpendicular position, report
twenty-five fathoms.
Again, answering the mate's bawled orders, Mayo carried the lead forward
and dropped it, after a period of waiting, during which the schooner
had been eased off. He was soaked to the skin, and was miserable in both
body and mind. He had betrayed himself, he had made an enemy of the man
who knew something which could help him; he felt a queer sense of shame
and despair when he remembered the girl and the expression of her face.
He tried to convince himself that he did not care what her opinion
of him was. What happened to that love she had professed on board the
_Olenia?_ What manner of maiden was this? He did not understand!
Five times he made his precarious trip with the lead, fumbling his way
outside the rigging.
In twenty fathoms Captain Downs decided to anchor, after the mate,
“arming” the lead by filling its cup with grease, found that they were
over good holding ground.
When the _Alden_ came into the wind and slowed down, slapping wet
sails, the second mate hammered out the holding-pin of the gigantic port
anchor, and the hawse-hole belched fathom after fathom of chain.
All hands were on deck letting sails go on the run into the lazy-jacks,
and the big schooner swung broadside to the trough of the sea. She made
a mighty pendulum, rolling rails under, sawing the black skies with her
towering masts.
There are many things which can happen aboard a schooner in that
position when men are either slow or stupid. A big negro who was paying
out the mizzen-peak halyards allowed his line to foul. Into the triangle
of sail the wind volleyed, and the thirty-foot mizzen-boom, the roll
of the ship helping, swung as far as its loosened sheets allowed. The
“traveler,” an iron hoop encircling a long bar of iron fastened at both
ends to the deck, struck sparks as a trolley pulley produces fire from a
sleety wire.
With splintering of wood and clanging of metal, the iron bar was
wrenched from its deck-fastenings and began to fly to and fro across the
deck at the end of its tether, like a giant's slung-shot. It circled, it
spun, it flung itself afar and returned in unexpected arcs.
Men fled from the area which this terror dominated.
The boom swung until it banged the mizzen shrouds to port, and then came
swooping back across the deck, to slam against the starboard shrouds.