Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The Coast
“I think you have something to say to me,” suggested the girl.
“I suppose I ought to say it. I've been wondering just how it ought to
be said. It's not pleasant news.”
“I am prepared to hear anything, Captain Mayo. Nothing matters a great
deal just now.”
“We are being driven on to the coast. I don't know whether it's the
Delaware or the New Jersey coast. It doesn't make much difference. The
breakers are just as bad in one place as in the other.”
“Why don't you anchor this boat? Are you going to let it go ashore and
be wrecked?” asked Bradish, with anger that was childish.
“The anchor seems to have been overlooked when we started on this little
excursion. As I remember it, there was some hurry and bustle,” returned
Mayo, dryly.
“Why didn't you remember it? You got us into this scrape. You slammed
and bossed everybody around. You didn't give anybody else a chance to
think. You call yourself a sailor! You're a devil of a sailor to come
off without an anchor.”
“I suppose so,” admitted Mayo.
“And there wasn't any sense, in coming off in this little boat. We ought
to have stayed on the schooner.”
“Ralph!” protested the girl. “Have you completely lost your mind? Don't
you know that the schooner sank almost the minute we left it?”
“Mr. Bradish's mind was very much occupied at the time,” said Captain
Mayo.
“I don't believe the schooner sank. What does a girl know about such
things? That fellow got scared, that's the trouble. There isn't any
sense in leaving a big boat in a storm. We would have been taken off
before this. We would have been all right. This is what comes of letting
a fool boss you around when he is scared,” he raved.
“You are the fool!” she cried, with passion. “Captain Mayo saved us.”
“Saved us from what? Here we are going into the breakers--and he says
so--and there's no anchor on here. He took everything out of my hands.
Now why doesn't he do something?”
“Don't pay any attention to him,” she pleaded.
“We are going to be drowned! You can't deny it, can you? We're going to
die!” He pulled a trembling hand from between his knees, where he had
held both hands pinched in order to steady them. He shook his fist at
Mayo. “Own up, now. We're going to die, aren't we?”
“I think it's right to tell the truth at this stage,” said Mayo, in
steady tones. “We're not children. Yonder is a beach with sand-reefs and
breakers, and when we strike the sand this boat will go over and over
and we shall be tossed out. The waves will throw us up and haul us back
like a cat playing with mice. And we stand about the same chance as
mice.”
“And that's the best you can do for us--and you call yourself a sailor!”
whined Bradish.
“I'm only a poor chap who has done his best as it came to his hand to
do,” said the young man, seeking the girl's eyes with his.
She gazed at him for a moment and then put both hands to her face and
began to sob.
“It's a hard thing to face, but we'd better understand the truth and be
as brave as we can,” said Mayo, gently.
“For myself I ain't a mite surprised,” averred the cook. “I had my
hunch! I was resigned. But my plans was interfered with. I wanted to go
down in good, deep, green, clean water like a sailor ought to. And now
I'm going to get mauled into the sand and have a painful death.”
“Shut up!” barked Mayo.
The girl was trembling, and he feared collapse.
Bradish began to blubber. “I'm not prepared to die,” he protested.
Mayo studied his passenger for some time, wrinkling his brows. “Bradish,
listen to me a moment!”
The New-Yorker gave him as much attention as terror and grief permitted.
“There isn't much we can do just now to fix up our general earthly
affairs. But we may as well clean the slate between us two. That will
help our consciences a little. I haven't any quarrel with you any more.
We won't be mushy about it. But let's cross it off.”
“It's all over,” mourned Bradish. “So what's the use of bearing
grudges?”
“I suppose it's true that the court has indicted me for manslaughter.
Bradish, tell me, man to man, whether I've got to go into those breakers
with that on my conscience!”
“I don't know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do! You know whether those men of the schooner _Warren_ were
drowned by any criminal mistake of mine or not!”
Bradish did not speak.
“You wouldn't have said as much to Captain Downs if you hadn't known
something,” insisted the victim of the plot.
“It was only what Burkett let drop when he came after some money. I
suppose he thought it was safe to talk to me. But what's the good of my
giving you guesswork? I don't know anything definite. I don't understand
sailor matters.”
“Bradish, what Burkett said--was it something about the compass--about
putting a job over on me by monkeying with the compass?”
“It was something like that.” His tone exhibited indifference; it
was evident that he was more occupied with his terror than with his
confession.
“Didn't Burkett say something about a magnet?”
“He got off some kind of a joke about Fogg in the pilot-house and
fog outside--but that the Fogg inside did the business. And he said
something about Fogg's iron wishbone.”
“So that was the way it was done--and done by the general manager of the
line!” cried Mayo. “The general manager himself! It's no wonder I have
smashed that suspicion between the eyes every time it bobbed up! I
suspected--but I didn't dare to suspect! Is that some of your high
finance, Bradish?”
“No, it isn't,” declared the New-Yorker, with heat. “It's an
understrapper like Fogg going ahead and producing results, so he calls
it. The big men never bother with the details.”
“The details! Taking away from me all I have worked for--my reputation
as a master, my papers, my standing--my liberty. By the gods, I'm going
to live! I'm going through those breakers! I'll face that gang like a
man who has fought his way back from hell,” raged the victim.
“This--this was none of my father's business! It could not have been,”
expostulated Miss Marston.
“Your father never knows anything about the details of Fogg's
operations,” declared Bradish.
“He ought to know,” insisted the maddened scapegoat. “He gives off his
orders, doesn't he? He sits in the middle of the web. What if he did
know how Fogg was operating?”
“Probably wouldn't stand for it! But he doesn't know. And the Angel
Gabriel himself wouldn't get a chance to tell him!” declared the clerk.
“A put-up job, then, is it--and all called high finance!” jeered Mayo.
“High finance isn't to blame for tricks the field-workers put out
so that they can earn their money quick and easy. What's the good of
pestering me with questions at this awful time? I'm going to die! I'm
going to die!” he wailed.
Miss Marston slid from the seat to her knees, in order that she might
be able to reach her hand to Mayo. “Will you let this handclasp tell
you all I feel about it--all your trouble, all your brave work in this
terrible time? I am so frightened, Captain Mayo! But I'm going to keep
my eyes on you--and I'll be ashamed to show you how frightened I am.”
He returned the fervent clasp of her fingers with gentle pressure and
reassuring smile. “Honestly, I feel too ugly to die just now. Let's keep
on hoping.”
But when he stood up and beheld the white mountains of water between
their little boat and the shore, and realized what would happen when
they were in that savage tumult, with the undertow dragging and the
surges lashing, he felt no hope within himself.
From the appearance of the coast he could not determine their probable
location. The land was barren and sandy. There seemed to be no inlet.
As far as he could see the line of frothing white was unbroken. The
sea foamed across broad shallows, where no boat could possibly remain
upright and no human being could hope to live.
Nevertheless, he remained standing and peered under his hand, resolved
to be alert till the last, determined to grasp any opportunity.
All at once he beheld certain black lines in perpendicular silhouette
against the foam. At first he was not certain just what they could be,
and he observed them narrowly as the boat tossed on its way.
At last their identity was revealed. They were weir-stakes. The weir
itself was evidently dismantled. Such stakes as remained were set some
distance from one another, like fence-posts located irregularly.
He made hasty observation of bearings as the boat drifted, and was
certain that the sea would carry them down past the stakes. How near
they would pass depended on the vagary of the waves and the tide. He
realized that three men, even if they were able seamen, could do little
in the way of rowing or guiding the longboat in the welter of that sea,
now surging madly over the shoals. He knew that there was not much water
under the keel, for the ocean was turbid with swirling sand, and the
waves were more mountainous, heaped high by the friction of the water on
the bottom. Every now and then the crest of a roller flaunted a banner
of bursting spray, showing breakers near at hand.
Mayo hurried to the bow of the boat and pulled free a long stretch of
cable. He made a bowline slip-knot, opened a noose as large as he could
handle, coiled the rest of the cable carefully, and poised himself on a
thwart.
“What now?” asked the cook.
“No matter,” returned Mayo. His project was such a gamble that he did
not care to canvass it in advance.
The nearer they drove to the stakes the more unattainable those objects
seemed. They projected high above the water.
The cook perceived them and got up on his knees and squinted. “Huh!” he
sniffed. “You'll never make it. It can't be done!”
In his fierce anxiety Mayo heaved his noose too soon, and it fell short.
He dragged in the cable with all his quickness and strength and threw
the noose again. The rope hit the stake three-quarters of the way up and
fell into the sea.
“It needs a cowboy for that work,” muttered the cook.
Mayo recovered his noose and poised himself again.
In the shallows where they were the boat which bore him became a
veritable bucking bronco. It was flung high, it swooped down into the
hollows. He made a desperate try for the next stake in line. The noose
caught, and he snubbed quickly. The top of the stake came away with a
dull crack of rotten wood when the next wave lifted the boat.
Mayo pulled in his rope hand over hand with frantic haste. He
was obliged to free the broken stake from the noose and pull his
extemporized lasso into position again. He made a wider noose. His
failure had taught a point or two. He waited till the boat was on the
top of a wave. He curbed his desperate impatience, set his teeth, and
whirled the noose about his head in a widening circle. Then he cast just
as the boat began to drop. The rope encircled the stake, dropped to the
water, and he paid out all his free cable so that a good length of the
heavy rope might lie in the water and form a makeshift bridle. When he
snubbed carefully the noose drew close around the stake, and the latter
held. The waves which rode under them were terrific, and Mayo's heart
came into his mouth every time a tug and shock indicated that the rope
had come taut.
However, after five minutes of anxious waiting, kneeling in the bow, his
eyes on the cable, he found his courage rising and his hopes glowing.
“Does it mean--” gasped the girl, when he turned and looked at her.
“I don't know just what it will mean in the end, Miss Marston,” he
said, with emotion. “But it's a reprieve while that rope holds.”
Bradish sat clutching the gunwale with both hands, staring over his
shoulder at the waters frothing and roaring on the shore. The girl
glanced at him occasionally with a certain wonderment in her expression.