Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The Coast
The clanging, tethered missile it bore on its end seemed to be searching
for a victim. When the boom met the starboard shrouds in its headlong
rush, the schooner shivered.
“Free that halyard and douse the peak!” roared the first mate.
A sailor started, ducking low, but he ran back when the boom came across
the deck with such a vicious swing that the iron bar fairly screamed
through the air.
“Gawd-a-mighty! She'll bang the mast out of her!” clamored Captain
Downs. “Get some men to those halyards, Mr. Dodge! Catch that boom!”
The mate ran and kicked at a sailor, shouting profane orders. He seized
the fellow and thrust him toward the pins where the halyards were
belayed. But at that instant the rushing boom came hurtling overhead
with its slung-shot, and the iron banged the rail almost exactly where
the fouled line was secured. The mate and the sailor fell flat on their
faces and crawled back from the zone of danger.
“Get some rope and noose that boom! Lassoo it!” commanded the master,
touching up his orders with some lurid sea oaths.
But the men who stepped forward did so timidly and slowly, and dodged
back when the boom threatened. The flying bar was a terrible weapon. Now
it swung in toward the mast--now swept in wider radius. Just where it
would next sweep the deck between the masts depended on the vagary of
wave and wind. It was perfectly apparent that anybody who got in its
path would meet death as instantly as a fly under a housewife's spanker.
Life is sweet, even if a man is black and is toiling for a dollar-a-day
wage.
And even if a man is a mate, at a higher wage and with more
responsibility, he is inclined to think of himself before he figures on
saving a mast and gear for a schooner's owners.
“What kind of a gor-rammed crew have I got aboard here?” shrieked the
master.
“About the kind that all wind-jammers carry these days,” said a voice at
his elbow.
Captain Downs whirled and found Mayo there. “How do you dare to speak to
me, you tin-kettle sailor?” demanded the master. In his passion he went
on: “You're aboard here under false pretenses. You can't even do your
work. You have made this vessel liable by assaulting a passenger. You're
no good! With you aboard here I'm just the same as one man short.” But
he had no time to devote to this person.
He turned away and began to revile his mates and his sailors, his voice
rising higher each time the rampaging boom crashed from side to side.
One or two of the backstays had parted, and it was plain that before
long the mast would go by the board.
“If that mast comes out it's apt to smash us clear to the water-line,”
lamented the captain.
“If you can make your herd of sheep give me a hand at the right time,
I'll show you that a tin-kettle sailor is as good as a wind-jammer
swab,” said Mayo, retaliating with some of the same sort of rancor that
Captain Downs had been expending. In that crisis he was bold enough to
presume on his identity as a master mariner. “I'd hate to find this kind
of a bunch on any steamboat I've ever had experience with.”
Then he ran away before the captain had time to retort. He made a slide
across the danger zone on his back, like a runner in a ball game. This
move brought him into a safe place between the mainmast and the mizzen.
There was a coil of extra cable here, and he grabbed the loose end and
deftly made a running bowline knot. He set the noose firmly upon his
shoulders, leaped up, and caught at the hoops on the mizzenmast.
“See to it that the line runs free from that coil, and stand by for
orders!” he shouted, and though his dyed skin was dark and he wore the
garb of the common sailor, he spoke with the unmistakable tone of the
master mariner. The second mate ran to the line and took charge.
“This is a bucking bronco, all right!” muttered Mayo. “But it's for the
honor of the steamboat men! I'll show this gang!”
He poised himself for a few moments on the crotch of the boom, clinging
to the cringles of the luff--the short ropes with which the sail is
reefed.
As he stood there, gathering himself for his desperate undertaking,
waiting for opportunity, taking the measure of the lashing and insensate
monster whom he had resolved to subdue, he heard Captain Downs bawl an
impatient command:
“Passengers go below!”
Mayo looked aft and saw Alma Marston clinging to the spike-rack of the
spanker mast. The coach-house lantern shone upon her white face.
“Go below!” repeated the master.
She shook her head.
“This is no place for a woman.”
“The vessel is going to sink!” she quavered.
“The schooner is all right. You go below!”
How bitter her fear was Mayo could not determine. But even at his
distance he could see stubborn resolution on her countenance.
“If I've got to die, I'll not die down there in a box,” she cried. “I'm
going to stay right here.”
Captain Downs swore and turned his back on her. Apparently he did not
care to come to a real clinch with this feminine mutineer.
The great spar crashed out to the extent of its arc, and the sail
volleyed with it, ballooning under the weight of the wind. The
reef-points were no longer within Mayo's reach. He ran along the boom,
arms outspread to steady himself, and was half-way to its end before the
telltale surge under him gave warning. Then he fell upon the huge stick,
rolled under it, and shoved arms and legs under the foot of the sail.
Barely had he clutched the spar in fierce embrace before it began its
return journey. It was a dizzy sweep across the deck, a breath-taking
plunge.
When the spar collided with the stays he felt as if arms and legs would
be wrenched from his body. He did not venture to move or to relax his
hold. He clung with all his strength, and nerved himself for the return
journey. He had watched carefully, and knew something of the vagaries
of the giant flail. When it was flung to port the wind helped to hold
it there until the resistless surge of the schooner sent it flying wild
once more. He knew that no mere flesh and blood could endure many
of those collisions with the stays. He resolved to act on the next
oscillation to port, in order that his strength might not be gone.
“See that the cable runs free!” he screamed as he felt the stick lift
for its swoop.
He swung himself upward over the spar the moment it struck, and the
momentum helped him. He ran again, steadying himself like a tight-wire
acrobat. He snatched the noose from his shoulders, slipped it over
the end of the boom, and yelled an order, with all the strength of his
lungs:
“Pull her taut!”
At that instant the boom started to swing again.
Standing on the end of the spar, he was outboard; the frothing sea was
under him. He could not jump then; to leap when the boom was sweeping
across the deck meant a skinful of broken bones; to wait till the boom
brought up against the stays, so he realized, would invite certain
disaster; he would either be crushed between the boom and shrouds or
snapped far out into the ocean as a bean 'is filliped by a thumb. On the
extreme end of the spar the leverage would be so great that he could not
hope to cling there with arms and legs.
A queer flick of thought brought to Mayo the phrase, “Between the devil
and the deep sea.” That flying boom was certainly the devil, and the
foaming sea looked mighty deep.
Her weather roll was more sluggish and Mayo had a moment to look about
for some mode of escape.
He saw the sail of “number four” mast sprawling loose in its lazy-jacks,
unfurled and showing a tumbled expanse of canvas. When he was inside the
rail, and while the boom was gathering momentum, he took his life in his
hands and his grit between his teeth and leaped toward the sail. He made
the jump just at the moment when the boom would give him the most help.
He heard Captain Downs's astonished oath when he dove over that worthy
mariner's head, a human comet in a twenty-foot parabola.
He landed in the sail on his hands and knees, yelling, even as he
alighted: “Catch her, boys!”
They did it when the spar banged against the stays. They surged on the
rope, tightened the noose, and before the vessel rolled again had made
half a dozen turns of the free end of the cable around the nearest
cleats.
Mayo scrambled down from the sail and helped them complete the work of
securing the spar. He passed near Captain Downs when the job had been
finished.
“Well,” growled the master of the _Alden_, “what do you expect me to say
to that?”
“I simply ask you to keep from saying something.”
“What?”
“That a steamboat man can't earn his pay aboard a wind-jammer, sir. I
don't like to feel that I am under obligations in any way.”
The master grunted.
“And if the little thing I have done helps to square that break I made
by licking your passenger I'll be glad of it,” added Mayo.
“You needn't rub it in,” said Captain Downs, carefully noting that there
was nobody within hearing distance. “When a man has been in a nightmare
for twenty-four hours, like I've been, you've got to make some
allowances, Captain Mayo. This is a terrible mixed-upmess.” He squinted
at the mizzen rigging where the lanterns revealed the damage. “And by
the way those backstays are ripped out, and seeing how that mast is
wabbling, this schooner is liable to be about as badly mixed up as the
people are on board of her.”
Mayo turned away and went back to his work. They were rigging
extra stays for the mizzenmast. And he noted that the girl near the
coach-house door was staring at him with a great deal of interest. But
in that gloom he was only a moving figure among toiling men.
An hour later the mate ordered the oil-bags to be tied to the catheads.
The bags were huge gunny sacks stuffed with cotton waste which was
saturated with oil.
In spite of the fact that her spanker, double-reefed, was set in order
to hold her up to the wind, weather-vane fashion, the schooner seemed
determined to keep her broadside to the tumbling seas. The oil slick
helped only a little; every few moments a wave with spoondrift flying
from it would smash across the deck, volleying tons of water between
rails, with a sound like thunder. At these times the swirling torrent in
the waist would reach to a man's knees.
Mayo did not take his watch below. The excitement of his recent
experience had driven away all desire for sleep, and the sheathing in
the fo'c'sle was squawking with such infernal din that only a deaf man
could have remained there in comfort.
However, he was not uneasy in regard to the safety of the schooner. In
a winter gale, with ice caking on her, he would have viewed their
situation in different light. But he had frequently seen the seas
breaking over the wallowing coal-luggers when he had passed them at
anchor on the coast.
He made a trip of his own along the main-deck, scrambling upon the spars
to avoid the occasional deluge which swept her amidship. The battened
hatches were apparently withstanding the onslaughts of the waves. He
could feel less weight in the wind. It was apparent that the crisis of
the blow had passed. The waves were not so savage; their crests were not
breaking. But just then the second mate rushed past, and Mayo overheard
the report he gave the captain, who was pacing the lee alley:
“The mizzenmast is getting more play, sir. I'm afraid it's raising the
devil with the step and ke'lson.”
“Rig extra stays and try her again for water,” ordered the master.
Mayo, returning to the mizzen, found the entire crew grouped there.
The mast was writhing and groaning in its deck collar, twisting its
coat--the canvas covering at its foot where it entered the deck.
The dusky faces were exhibiting much concern. They had flocked where the
ship was dealing herself a wound; the sailor sixth sense of impending