________________________________________________
_ HE WAITED. Before his eyes the engines turned with slow labour,
that in the moment of going off into a mad fling would stop dead
at Mr. Rout's shout, "Look out, Beale!" They paused in an
intelligent immobility, stilled in mid-stroke, a heavy crank
arrested on the cant, as if conscious of danger and the passage
of time. Then, with a "Now, then!" from the chief, and the sound
of a breath expelled through clenched teeth, they would
accomplish the interrupted revolution and begin another.
There was the prudent sagacity of wisdom and the deliberation of
enormous strength in their movements. This was their work -- this
patient coaxing of a distracted ship over the fury of the waves
and into the very eye of the wind. At times Mr. Rout's chin
would sink on his breast, and he watched them with knitted
eyebrows as if lost in thought.
The voice that kept the hurricane out of Jukes' ear began: "Take
the hands with you . . . ," and left off unexpectedly.
"What could I do with them, sir?"
A harsh, abrupt, imperious clang exploded suddenly. The three
pairs of eyes flew up to the telegraph dial to see the hand jump
from FULL to STOP, as if snatched by a devil. And then these
three men in the engineroom had the intimate sensation of a check
upon the ship, of a strange shrinking, as if she had gathered
herself for a desperate leap.
"Stop her!" bellowed Mr. Rout.
Nobody -- not even Captain MacWhirr, who alone on deck had caught
sight of a white line of foam coming on at such a height that he
couldn't believe his eyes -nobody was to know the steepness of
that sea and the awful depth of the hollow the hurricane had
scooped out behind the running wall of water.
It raced to meet the ship, and, with a pause, as of girding the
loins, the Nan-Shan lifted her bows and leaped. The flames in
all the lamps sank, darkening the engine-room. One went out.
With a tearing crash and a swirling, raving tumult, tons of water
fell upon the deck, as though the ship had darted under the foot
of a cataract.
Down there they looked at each other, stunned.
"Swept from end to end, by God!" bawled Jukes.
She dipped into the hollow straight down, as if going over the
edge of the world. The engine-room toppled forward menacingly,
like the inside of a tower nodding in an earthquake. An awful
racket, of iron things falling, came from the stokehold. She
hung on this appalling slant long enough for Beale to drop on his
hands and knees and begin to crawl as if he meant to fly on all
fours out of the engine-room, and for Mr. Rout to turn his head
slowly, rigid, cavernous, with the lower jaw dropping. Jukes had
shut his eyes, and his face in a moment became hopelessly blank
and gentle, like the face of a blind man.
At last she rose slowly, staggering, as if she had to lift a
mountain with her bows.
Mr. Rout shut his mouth; Jukes blinked; and little Beale stood up
hastily.
"Another one like this, and that's the last of her," cried the
chief.
He and Jukes looked at each other, and the same thought came into
their heads. The Captain! Everything must have been swept away.
Steering-gear gone -- ship like a log. All over directly.
"Rush!" ejaculated Mr. Rout thickly, glaring with enlarged,
doubtful eyes at Jukes, who answered him by an irresolute glance.
The clang of the telegraph gong soothed them instantly. The
black hand dropped in a flash from STOP to FULL.
"Now then, Beale!" cried Mr. Rout.
The steam hissed low. The piston-rods slid in and out. Jukes
put his ear to the tube. The voice was ready for him. It said:
"Pick up all the money. Bear a hand now. I'll want you up here."
And that was all.
"Sir?" called up Jukes. There was no answer.
He staggered away like a defeated man from the field of battle.
He had got, in some way or other, a cut above his left eyebrow --
a cut to the bone. He was not aware of it in the least:
quantities of the China Sea, large enough to break his neck for
him, had gone over his head, had cleaned, washed, and salted that
wound. It did not bleed, but only gaped red; and this gash over
the eye, his dishevelled hair, the disorder of his clothes, gave
him the aspect of a man worsted in a fight with fists.
"Got to pick up the dollars." He appealed to Mr. Rout, smiling
pitifully at random.
"What's that?" asked Mr. Rout, wildly. "Pick up . . . ? I don't
care. . . ." Then, quivering in every muscle, but with an
exaggeration of paternal tone, "Go away now, for God's sake. You
deck people'll drive me silly. There's that second mate been
going for the old man. Don't you know? You fellows are going
wrong for want of something to do. . . ."
At these words Jukes discovered in himself the beginnings of
anger. Want of something to do -- indeed. . . . Full of hot
scorn against the chief, he turned to go the way he had come. In
the stokehold the plump donkeyman toiled with his shovel mutely,
as if his tongue had been cut out; but the second was carrying on
like a noisy, undaunted maniac, who had preserved his skill in
the art of stoking under a marine boiler.
"Hallo, you wandering officer! Hey! Can't you get some of your
slush-slingers to wind up a few of them ashes? I am getting
choked with them here. Curse it! Hallo! Hey! Remember the
articles: Sailors and firemen to assist each other. Hey! D'ye
hear?"
Jukes was climbing out frantically, and the other, lifting up his
face after him, howled, "Can't you speak? What are you poking
about here for? What's your game, anyhow?"
A frenzy possessed Jukes. By the time he was back amongst the
men in the darkness of the alleyway, he felt ready to wring all
their necks at the slightest sign of hanging back. The very
thought of it exasperated him. He couldn't hang back. They
shouldn't.
The impetuosity with which he came amongst them carried them
along. They had already been excited and startled at all his
comings and goings -- by the fierceness and rapidity of his
movements; and more felt than seen in his rushes, he appeared
formidable -busied with matters of life and death that brooked no
delay. At his first word he heard them drop into the bunker one
after another obediently, with heavy thumps.
They were not clear as to what would have to be done. "What is
it? What is it?" they were asking each other. The boatswain
tried to explain; the sounds of a great scuffle surprised them:
and the mighty shocks, reverberating awfully in the black bunker,
kept them in mind of their danger. When the boatswain threw open
the door it seemed that an eddy of the hurricane, stealing
through the iron sides of the ship, had set all these bodies
whirling like dust: there came to them a confused uproar, a
tempestuous tumult, a fierce mutter, gusts of screams dying away,
and the tramping of feet mingling with the blows of the sea.
For a moment they glared amazed, blocking the doorway. Jukes
pushed through them brutally. He said nothing, and simply darted
in. Another lot of coolies on the ladder, struggling suicidally
to break through the battened hatch to a swamped deck, fell off
as before, and he disappeared under them like a man overtaken by
a landslide.
The boatswain yelled excitedly: "Come along. Get the mate out.
He'll be trampled to death. Come on."
They charged in, stamping on breasts, on fingers, on faces,
catching their feet in heaps of clothing, kicking broken wood;
but before they could get hold of him Jukes emerged waist deep in
a multitude of clawing hands. In the instant he had been lost to
view, all the buttons of his jacket had gone, its back had got
split up to the collar, his waistcoat had been torn open. The
central struggling mass of Chinamen went over to the roll, dark,
indistinct, helpless, with a wild gleam of many eyes in the dim
light of the lamps.
"Leave me alone -- damn you. I am all right," screeched Jukes.
"Drive them forward. Watch your chance when she pitches.
Forward with 'em. Drive them against the bulkhead. Jam 'em up."
The rush of the sailors into the seething 'tween-deck was like a
splash of cold water into a boiling cauldron. The commotion sank
for a moment.
The bulk of Chinamen were locked in such a compact scrimmage
that, linking their arms and aided by an appalling dive of the
ship, the seamen sent it forward in one great shove, like a solid
block. Behind their backs small clusters and loose bodies
tumbled from side to side.
The boatswain performed prodigious feats of strength. With his
long arms open, and each great paw clutching at a stanchion, he
stopped the rush of seven entwined Chinamen rolling like a
boulder. His joints cracked; he said, "Ha!" and they flew apart.
But the carpenter showed the greater intelligence. Without
saying a word to anybody he went back into the alleyway, to fetch
several coils of cargo gear he had seen there -- chain and rope.
With these life-lines were rigged.
There was really no resistance. The struggle, however it began,
had turned into a scramble of blind panic. If the coolies had
started up after their scattered dollars they were by that time
fighting only for their footing. They took each other by the
throat merely to save themselves from being hurled about.
Whoever got a hold anywhere would kick at the others who caught
at his legs and hung on, till a roll sent them flying together
across the deck.
The coming of the white devils was a terror. Had they come to
kill? The individuals torn out of the ruck became very limp in
the seamen's hands: some, dragged aside by the heels, were
passive, like dead bodies, with open, fixed eyes. Here and there
a coolie would fall on his knees as if begging for mercy;
several, whom the excess of fear made unruly, were hit with hard
fists between the eyes, and cowered; while those who were hurt
submitted to rough handling, blinking rapidly without a plaint.
Faces streamed with blood; there were raw places on the shaven
heads, scratches, bruises, torn wounds, gashes. The broken
porcelain out of the chests was mostly responsible for the
latter. Here and there a Chinaman, wild-eyed, with his tail
unplaited, nursed a bleeding sole.
They had been ranged closely, after having been shaken into
submission, cuffed a little to allay excitement, addressed in
gruff words of encouragement that sounded like promises of evil.
They sat on the deck in ghastly, drooping rows, and at the end
the carpenter, with two hands to help him, moved busily from
place to place, setting taut and hitching the life-lines. The
boatswain, with one leg and one arm embracing a stanchion,
struggled with a lamp pressed to his breast, trying to get a
light, and growling all the time like an industrious gorilla.
The figures of seamen stooped repeatedly, with the movements of
gleaners, and everything was being flung into the bunker:
clothing, smashed wood, broken china, and the dollars, too,
gathered up in men's jackets. Now and then a sailor would
stagger towards the doorway with his arms full of rubbish; and
dolorous, slanting eyes followed his movements.
With every roll of the ship the long rows of sitting Celestials
would sway forward brokenly, and her headlong dives knocked
together the line of shaven polls from end to end. When the wash
of water rolling on the deck died away for a moment, it seemed to
Jukes, yet quivering from his exertions, that in his mad struggle
down there he had overcome the wind somehow: that a silence had
fallen upon the ship, a silence in which the sea struck
thunderously at her sides.
Everything had been cleared out of the 'tween-deck -- all the
wreckage, as the men said. They stood erect and tottering above
the level of heads and drooping shoulders. Here and there a
coolie sobbed for his breath. Where the high light fell, Jukes
could see the salient ribs of one, the yellow, wistful face of
another; bowed necks; or would meet a dull stare directed at his
face. He was amazed that there had been no corpses; but the lot
of them seemed at their last gasp, and they appeared to him more
pitiful than if they had been all dead.
Suddenly one of the coolies began to speak. The light came and
went on his lean, straining face; he threw his head up like a
baying hound. From the bunker came the sounds of knocking and
the tinkle of some dollars rolling loose; he stretched out his
arm, his mouth yawned black, and the incomprehensible guttural
hooting sounds, that did not seem to belong to a human language,
penetrated Jukes with a strange emotion as if a brute had tried
to be eloquent.
Two more started mouthing what seemed to Jukes fierce
denunciations; the others stirred with grunts and growls. Jukes
ordered the hands out of the 'tweendecks hurriedly. He left last
himself, backing through the door, while the grunts rose to a
loud murmur and hands were extended after him as after a
malefactor. The boatswain shot the bolt, and remarked uneasily,
"Seems as if the wind had dropped, sir."
The seamen were glad to get back into the alleyway. Secretly each
of them thought that at the last moment he could rush out on deck
-- and that was a comfort. There is something horribly repugnant
in the idea of being drowned under a deck. Now they had done
with the Chinamen, they again became conscious of the ship's
position.
Jukes on coming out of the alleyway found himself up to the neck
in the noisy water. He gained the bridge, and discovered he
could detect obscure shapes as if his sight had become
preternaturally acute. He saw faint outlines. They recalled not
the familiar aspect of the Nan-Shan, but something remembered -an
old dismantled steamer he had seen years ago rotting on a
mudbank. She recalled that wreck.
There was no wind, not a breath, except the faint currents
created by the lurches of the ship. The smoke tossed out of the
funnel was settling down upon her deck. He breathed it as he
passed forward. He felt the deliberate throb of the engines, and
heard small sounds that seemed to have survived the great uproar:
the knocking of broken fittings, the rapid tumbling of some piece
of wreckage on the bridge. He perceived dimly the squat shape of
his captain holding on to a twisted bridge-rail, motionless and
swaying as if rooted to the planks. The unexpected stillness of
the air oppressed Jukes.
"We have done it, sir," he gasped.
"Thought you would," said Captain MacWhirr.
"Did you?" murmured Jukes to himself.
"Wind fell all at once," went on the Captain.
Jukes burst out: "If you think it was an easy job --"
But his captain, clinging to the rail, paid no attention.
"According to the books the worst is not over yet."
"If most of them hadn't been half dead with seasickness and
fright, not one of us would have come out of that 'tween-deck
alive," said Jukes.
"Had to do what's fair by them," mumbled MacWhirr, stolidly.
"You don't find everything in books."
"Why, I believe they would have risen on us if I hadn't ordered
the hands out of that pretty quick," continued Jukes with warmth.
After the whisper of their shouts, their ordinary tones, so
distinct, rang out very loud to their ears in the amazing
stillness of the air. It seemed to them they were talking in a
dark and echoing vault.
Through a jagged aperture in the dome of clouds the light of a
few stars fell upon the black sea, rising and falling confusedly.
Sometimes the head of a watery cone would topple on board and
mingle with the rolling flurry of foam on the swamped deck; and
the Nan-Shan wallowed heavily at the bottom of a circular cistern
of clouds. This ring of dense vapours, gyrating madly round the
calm of the centre, encompassed the ship like a motionless and
unbroken wall of an aspect inconceivably sinister. Within, the
sea, as if agitated by an internal commotion, leaped in peaked
mounds that jostled each other, slapping heavily against her
sides; and a low moaning sound, the infinite plaint of the
storm's fury, came from beyond the limits of the menacing calm.
Captain MacWhirr remained silent, and Jukes' ready ear caught
suddenly the faint, longdrawn roar of some immense wave rushing
unseen under that thick blackness, which made the appalling
boundary of his vision.
"Of course," he started resentfully, "they thought we had caught
at the chance to plunder them. Of course! You said -- pick up
the money. Easier said than done. They couldn't tell what was
in our heads. We came in, smash -- right into the middle of them.
Had to do it by a rush."
"As long as it's done . . . ," mumbled the Captain, without
attempting to look at Jukes. "Had to do what's fair."
"We shall find yet there's the devil to pay when this is over,"
said Jukes, feeling very sore. "Let them only recover a bit, and
you'll see. They will fly at our throats, sir. Don't forget,
sir, she isn't a British ship now. These brutes know it well,
too. The damned Siamese flag."
"We are on board, all the same," remarked Captain MacWhirr.
"The trouble's not over yet," insisted Jukes, prophetically,
reeling and catching on. "She's a wreck," he added, faintly.
"The trouble's not over yet," assented Captain MacWhirr, half
aloud. . . . "Look out for her a minute."
"Are you going off the deck, sir?" asked Jukes, hurriedly, as if
the storm were sure to pounce upon him as soon as he had been
left alone with the ship.
He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a
wild scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleams of
distant worlds. She moved slowly, breathing into the still core
of the hurricane the excess of her strength in a white cloud of
steam -- and the deeptoned vibration of the escape was like the
defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea impatient for
the renewal of the contest. It ceased suddenly. The still air
moaned. Above Jukes' head a few stars shone into a pit of black
vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship
under the patch of glittering sky. The stars, too, seemed to
look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster of
their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow.
Captain MacWhirr had gone into the chart-room. There was no light
there; but he could feel the disorder of that place where he used
to live tidily. His armchair was upset. The books had tumbled
out on the floor: he scrunched a piece of glass under his boot.
He groped for the matches, and found a box on a shelf with a deep
ledge. He struck one, and puckering the corners of his eyes,
held out the little flame towards the barometer whose glittering
top of glass and metals nodded at him continuously.
It stood very low -- incredibly low, so low that Captain MacWhirr
grunted. The match went out, and hurriedly he extracted another,
with thick, stiff fingers.
Again a little flame flared up before the nodding glass and metal
of the top. His eyes looked at it, narrowed with attention, as
if expecting an imperceptible sign. With his grave face he
resembled a booted and misshapen pagan burning incense before the
oracle of a Joss. There was no mistake. It was the lowest
reading he had ever seen in his life.
Captain MacWhirr emitted a low whistle. He forgot himself till
the flame diminished to a blue spark, burnt his fingers and
vanished. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the thing!
There was an aneroid glass screwed above the couch. He turned
that way, struck another match, and discovered the white face of
the other instrument looking at him from the bulkhead, meaningly,
not to be gainsaid, as though the wisdom of men were made
unerring by the indifference of matter. There was no room for
doubt now. Captain MacWhirr pshawed at it, and threw the match
down.
The worst was to come, then -- and if the books were right this
worst would be very bad. The experience of the last six hours
had enlarged his conception of what heavy weather could be like.
"It'll be terrific," he pronounced, mentally. He had not
consciously looked at anything by the light of the matches except
at the barometer; and yet somehow he had seen that his
waterbottle and the two tumblers had been flung out of their
stand. It seemed to give him a more intimate knowledge of the
tossing the ship had gone through. "I wouldn't have believed
it," he thought. And his table had been cleared, too; his
rulers, his pencils, the inkstand -- all the things that had
their safe appointed places -- they were gone, as if a
mischievous hand had plucked them out one by one and flung them
on the wet floor. The hurricane had broken in upon the orderly
arrangements of his privacy. This had never happened before, and
the feeling of dismay reached the very seat of his composure.
And the worst was to come yet! He was glad the trouble in the
'tween-deck had been discovered in time. If the ship had to go
after all, then, at least, she wouldn't be going to the bottom
with a lot of people in her fighting teeth and claw. That would
have been odious. And in that feeling there was a humane
intention and a vague sense of the fitness of things.
These instantaneous thoughts were yet in their essence heavy and
slow, partaking of the nature of the man. He extended his hand
to put back the matchbox in its corner of the shelf. There were
always matches there -- by his order. The steward had his
instructions impressed upon him long before. "A box . . . just
there, see? Not so very full . . . where I can put my hand on
it, steward. Might want a light in a hurry. Can't tell on board
ship what you might want in a hurry. Mind, now."
And of course on his side he would be careful to put it back in
its place scrupulously. He did so now, but before he removed his
hand it occurred to him that perhaps he would never have occasion
to use that box any more. The vividness of the thought checked
him and for an infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers
closed again on the small object as though it had been the symbol
of all these little habits that chain us to the weary round of
life. He released it at last, and letting himself fall on the
settee, listened for the first sounds of returning wind.
Not yet. He heard only the wash of water, the heavy splashes,
the dull shocks of the confused seas boarding his ship from all
sides. She would never have a chance to clear her decks.
But the quietude of the air was startlingly tense and unsafe,
like a slender hair holding a sword suspended over his head. By
this awful pause the storm penetrated the defences of the man and
unsealed his lips. He spoke out in the solitude and the pitch
darkness of the cabin, as if addressing another being awakened
within his breast.
"I shouldn't like to lose her," he said half aloud.
He sat unseen, apart from the sea, from his ship, isolated, as if
withdrawn from the very current of his own existence, where such
freaks as talking to himself surely had no place. His palms
reposed on his knees, he bowed his short neck and puffed heavily,
surrendering to a strange sensation of weariness he was not
enlightened enough to recognize for the fatigue of mental stress.
From where he sat he could reach the door of a washstand locker.
There should have been a towel there. There was. Good. . . .
He took it out, wiped his face, and afterwards went on rubbing
his wet head. He towelled himself with energy in the dark, and
then remained motionless with the towel on his knees. A moment
passed, of a stillness so profound that no one could have guessed
there was a man sitting in that cabin. Then a murmur arose.
"She may come out of it yet."
When Captain MacWhirr came out on deck, which he did brusquely,
as though he had suddenly become conscious of having stayed away
too long, the calm had lasted already more than fifteen minutes
-- long enough to make itself intolerable even to his
imagination. Jukes, motionless on the forepart of the bridge,
began to speak at once. His voice, blank and forced as though he
were talking through hard-set teeth, seemed to flow away on all
sides into the darkness, deepening again upon the sea.
"I had the wheel relieved. Hackett began to sing out that he was
done. He's lying in there alongside the steering-gear with a
face like death. At first I couldn't get anybody to crawl out
and relieve the poor devil. That boss'n's worse than no good, I
always said. Thought I would have had to go myself and haul out
one of them by the neck."
"Ah, well," muttered the Captain. He stood watchful by Jukes'
side.
"The second mate's in there, too, holding his head. Is he hurt,
sir?"
"No -- crazy," said Captain MacWhirr, curtly.
"Looks as if he had a tumble, though."
"I had to give him a push," explained the Captain.
Jukes gave an impatient sigh.
"It will come very sudden," said Captain MacWhirr, "and from over
there, I fancy. God only knows though. These books are only
good to muddle your head and make you jumpy. It will be bad, and
there's an end. If we only can steam her round in time to meet
it. . . ."
A minute passed. Some of the stars winked rapidly and vanished.
"You left them pretty safe?" began the Captain abruptly, as
though the silence were unbearable.
"Are you thinking of the coolies, sir? I rigged lifelines all
ways across that 'tween-deck."
"Did you? Good idea, Mr. Jukes."
"I didn't . . . think you cared to . . . know," said Jukes -- the
lurching of the ship cut his speech as though somebody had been
jerking him around while he talked -- "how I got on with . . .
that infernal job. We did it. And it may not matter in the
end."
"Had to do what's fair, for all -- they are only Chinamen. Give
them the same chance with ourselves -- hang it all. She isn't
lost yet. Bad enough to be shut up below in a gale --"
"That's what I thought when you gave me the job, sir,"
interjected Jukes, moodily.
"-- without being battered to pieces," pursued Captain MacWhirr
with rising vehemence. "Couldn't let that go on in my ship, if I
knew she hadn't five minutes to live. Couldn't bear it, Mr.
Jukes."
A hollow echoing noise, like that of a shout rolling in a rocky
chasm, approached the ship and went away again. The last star,
blurred, enlarged, as if returning to the fiery mist of its
beginning, struggled with the colossal depth of blackness hanging
over the ship -- and went out.
"Now for it!" muttered Captain MacWhirr. "Mr. Jukes."
"Here, sir."
The two men were growing indistinct to each other.
"We must trust her to go through it and come out on the other
side. That's plain and straight. There's no room for Captain
Wilson's storm-strategy here."
"No, sir."
"She will be smothered and swept again for hours," mumbled the
Captain. "There's not much left by this time above deck for the
sea to take away -- unless you or me."
"Both, sir," whispered Jukes, breathlessly.
"You are always meeting trouble half way, Jukes," Captain
MacWhirr remonstrated quaintly. "Though it's a fact that the
second mate is no good. D'ye hear, Mr. Jukes? You would be left
alone if. . . ."
Captain MacWhirr interrupted himself, and Jukes, glancing on all
sides, remained silent.
"Don't you be put out by anything," the Captain continued,
mumbling rather fast. "Keep her facing it. They may say what
they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it --
always facing it -- that's the way to get through. You are a
young sailor. Face it. That's enough for any man. Keep a cool
head."
"Yes, sir," said Jukes, with a flutter of the heart.
In the next few seconds the Captain spoke to the engine-room and
got an answer.
For some reason Jukes experienced an access of confidence, a
sensation that came from outside like a warm breath, and made him
feel equal to every demand. The distant muttering of the
darkness stole into his ears. He noted it unmoved, out of that
sudden belief in himself, as a man safe in a shirt of mail would
watch a point.
The ship laboured without intermission amongst the black hills of
water, paying with this hard tumbling the price of her life. She
rumbled in her depths, shaking a white plummet of steam into the
night, and Jukes' thought skimmed like a bird through the
engine-room, where Mr. Rout -- good man -- was ready. When the
rumbling ceased it seemed to him that there was a pause of every
sound, a dead pause in which Captain MacWhirr's voice rang out
startlingly.
"What's that? A puff of wind?" -- it spoke much louder than
Jukes had ever heard it before -- "On the bow. That's right.
She may come out of it yet."
The mutter of the winds drew near apace. In the forefront could
be distinguished a drowsy waking plaint passing on, and far off
the growth of a multiple clamour, marching and expanding. There
was the throb as of many drums in it, a vicious rushing note, and
like the chant of a tramping multitude.
Jukes could no longer see his captain distinctly. The darkness
was absolutely piling itself upon the ship. At most he made out
movements, a hint of elbows spread out, of a head thrown up.
Captain MacWhirr was trying to do up the top button of his
oilskin coat with unwonted haste. The hurricane, with its power
to madden the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn
strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground,
had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost,
had managed to wring out a few words. Before the renewed wrath
of winds swooped on his ship, Captain MacWhirr was moved to
declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: "I wouldn't like to
lose her."
He was spared that annoyance. _
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