________________________________________________
_ The next day, while the storm was blowing itself out, Wolf Larsen
and I crammed anatomy and surgery and set Mugridge's ribs. Then,
when the storm broke, Wolf Larsen cruised back and forth over that
portion of the ocean where we had encountered it, and somewhat more
to the westward, while the boats were being repaired and new sails
made and bent. Sealing schooner after sealing schooner we sighted
and boarded, most of which were in search of lost boats, and most
of which were carrying boats and crews they had picked up and which
did not belong to them. For the thick of the fleet had been to the
westward of us, and the boats, scattered far and wide, had headed
in mad flight for the nearest refuge.
Two of our boats, with men all safe, we took off the Cisco, and, to
Wolf Larsen's huge delight and my own grief, he culled Smoke, with
Nilson and Leach, from the San Diego. So that, at the end of five
days, we found ourselves short but four men - Henderson, Holyoak,
Williams, and Kelly, - and were once more hunting on the flanks of
the herd.
As we followed it north we began to encounter the dreaded sea-fogs.
Day after day the boats lowered and were swallowed up almost ere
they touched the water, while we on board pumped the horn at
regular intervals and every fifteen minutes fired the bomb gun.
Boats were continually being lost and found, it being the custom
for a boat to hunt, on lay, with whatever schooner picked it up,
until such time it was recovered by its own schooner. But Wolf
Larsen, as was to be expected, being a boat short, took possession
of the first stray one and compelled its men to hunt with the
Ghost, not permitting them to return to their own schooner when we
sighted it. I remember how he forced the hunter and his two men
below, a riffle at their breasts, when their captain passed by at
biscuit-toss and hailed us for information.
Thomas Mugridge, so strangely and pertinaciously clinging to life,
was soon limping about again and performing his double duties of
cook and cabin-boy. Johnson and Leach were bullied and beaten as
much as ever, and they looked for their lives to end with the end
of the hunting season; while the rest of the crew lived the lives
of dogs and were worked like dogs by their pitiless master. As for
Wolf Larsen and myself, we got along fairly well; though I could
not quite rid myself of the idea that right conduct, for me, lay in
killing him. He fascinated me immeasurably, and I feared him
immeasurably. And yet, I could not imagine him lying prone in
death. There was an endurance, as of perpetual youth, about him,
which rose up and forbade the picture. I could see him only as
living always, and dominating always, fighting and destroying,
himself surviving.
One diversion of his, when we were in the midst of the herd and the
sea was too rough to lower the boats, was to lower with two boat-
pullers and a steerer and go out himself. He was a good shot, too,
and brought many a skin aboard under what the hunters termed
impossible hunting conditions. It seemed the breath of his
nostrils, this carrying his life in his hands and struggling for it
against tremendous odds.
I was learning more and more seamanship; and one clear day - a
thing we rarely encountered now - I had the satisfaction of running
and handling the Ghost and picking up the boats myself. Wolf
Larsen had been smitten with one of his headaches, and I stood at
the wheel from morning until evening, sailing across the ocean
after the last lee boat, and heaving to and picking it and the
other five up without command or suggestion from him.
Gales we encountered now and again, for it was a raw and stormy
region, and, in the middle of June, a typhoon most memorable to me
and most important because of the changes wrought through it upon
my future. We must have been caught nearly at the centre of this
circular storm, and Wolf Larsen ran out of it and to the southward,
first under a double-reefed jib, and finally under bare poles.
Never had I imagined so great a sea. The seas previously
encountered were as ripples compared with these, which ran a half-
mile from crest to crest and which upreared, I am confident, above
our masthead. So great was it that Wolf Larsen himself did not
dare heave to, though he was being driven far to the southward and
out of the seal herd.
We must have been well in the path of the trans-Pacific steamships
when the typhoon moderated, and here, to the surprise of the
hunters, we found ourselves in the midst of seals - a second herd,
or sort of rear-guard, they declared, and a most unusual thing.
But it was "Boats over!" the boom-boom of guns, and the pitiful
slaughter through the long day.
It was at this time that I was approached by Leach. I had just
finished tallying the skins of the last boat aboard, when he came
to my side, in the darkness, and said in a low tone:
"Can you tell me, Mr. Van Weyden, how far we are off the coast, and
what the bearings of Yokohama are?"
My heart leaped with gladness, for I knew what he had in mind, and
I gave him the bearings - west-north-west, and five hundred miles
away.
"Thank you, sir," was all he said as he slipped back into the
darkness.
Next morning No. 3 boat and Johnson and Leach were missing. The
water-breakers and grub-boxes from all the other boats were
likewise missing, as were the beds and sea bags of the two men.
Wolf Larsen was furious. He set sail and bore away into the west-
north-west, two hunters constantly at the mastheads and sweeping
the sea with glasses, himself pacing the deck like an angry lion.
He knew too well my sympathy for the runaways to send me aloft as
look-out.
The wind was fair but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle
in a haystack to raise that tiny boat out of the blue immensity.
But he put the Ghost through her best paces so as to get between
the deserters and the land. This accomplished, he cruised back and
forth across what he knew must be their course.
On the morning of the third day, shortly after eight bells, a cry
that the boat was sighted came down from Smoke at the masthead.
All hands lined the rail. A snappy breeze was blowing from the
west with the promise of more wind behind it; and there, to
leeward, in the troubled silver of the rising sun, appeared and
disappeared a black speck.
We squared away and ran for it. My heart was as lead. I felt
myself turning sick in anticipation; and as I looked at the gleam
of triumph in Wolf Larsen's eyes, his form swam before me, and I
felt almost irresistibly impelled to fling myself upon him. So
unnerved was I by the thought of impending violence to Leach and
Johnson that my reason must have left me. I know that I slipped
down into the steerage in a daze, and that I was just beginning the
ascent to the deck, a loaded shot-gun in my hands, when I heard the
startled cry:
"There's five men in that boat!"
I supported myself in the companion-way, weak and trembling, while
the observation was being verified by the remarks of the rest of
the men. Then my knees gave from under me and I sank down, myself
again, but overcome by shock at knowledge of what I had so nearly
done. Also, I was very thankful as I put the gun away and slipped
back on deck.
No one had remarked my absence. The boat was near enough for us to
make out that it was larger than any sealing boat and built on
different lines. As we drew closer, the sail was taken in and the
mast unstepped. Oars were shipped, and its occupants waited for us
to heave to and take them aboard.
Smoke, who had descended to the deck and was now standing by my
side, began to chuckle in a significant way. I looked at him
inquiringly.
"Talk of a mess!" he giggled.
"What's wrong?" I demanded.
Again he chuckled. "Don't you see there, in the stern-sheets, on
the bottom? May I never shoot a seal again if that ain't a woman!"
I looked closely, but was not sure until exclamations broke out on
all sides. The boat contained four men, and its fifth occupant was
certainly a woman. We were agog with excitement, all except Wolf
Larsen, who was too evidently disappointed in that it was not his
own boat with the two victims of his malice.
We ran down the flying jib, hauled the jib-sheets to wind-ward and
the main-sheet flat, and came up into the wind. The oars struck
the water, and with a few strokes the boat was alongside. I now
caught my first fair glimpse of the woman. She was wrapped in a
long ulster, for the morning was raw; and I could see nothing but
her face and a mass of light brown hair escaping from under the
seaman's cap on her head. The eyes were large and brown and
lustrous, the mouth sweet and sensitive, and the face itself a
delicate oval, though sun and exposure to briny wind had burnt the
face scarlet.
She seemed to me like a being from another world. I was aware of a
hungry out-reaching for her, as of a starving man for bread. But
then, I had not seen a woman for a very long time. I know that I
was lost in a great wonder, almost a stupor, - this, then, was a
woman? - so that I forgot myself and my mate's duties, and took no
part in helping the new-comers aboard. For when one of the sailors
lifted her into Wolf Larsen's downstretched arms, she looked up
into our curious faces and smiled amusedly and sweetly, as only a
woman can smile, and as I had seen no one smile for so long that I
had forgotten such smiles existed.
"Mr. Van Weyden!"
Wolf Larsen's voice brought me sharply back to myself.
"Will you take the lady below and see to her comfort? Make up that
spare port cabin. Put Cooky to work on it. And see what you can
do for that face. It's burned badly."
He turned brusquely away from us and began to question the new men.
The boat was cast adrift, though one of them called it a "bloody
shame" with Yokohama so near.
I found myself strangely afraid of this woman I was escorting aft.
Also I was awkward. It seemed to me that I was realizing for the
first time what a delicate, fragile creature a woman is; and as I
caught her arm to help her down the companion stairs, I was
startled by its smallness and softness. Indeed, she was a slender,
delicate woman as women go, but to me she was so ethereally slender
and delicate that I was quite prepared for her arm to crumble in my
grasp. All this, in frankness, to show my first impression, after
long denial of women in general and of Maud Brewster in particular.
"No need to go to any great trouble for me," she protested, when I
had seated her in Wolf Larsen's arm-chair, which I had dragged
hastily from his cabin. "The men were looking for land at any
moment this morning, and the vessel should be in by night; don't
you think so?"
Her simple faith in the immediate future took me aback. How could
I explain to her the situation, the strange man who stalked the sea
like Destiny, all that it had taken me months to learn? But I
answered honestly:
"If it were any other captain except ours, I should say you would
be ashore in Yokohama to-morrow. But our captain is a strange man,
and I beg of you to be prepared for anything - understand? - for
anything."
"I - I confess I hardly do understand," she hesitated, a perturbed
but not frightened expression in her eyes. "Or is it a
misconception of mine that shipwrecked people are always shown
every consideration? This is such a little thing, you know. We
are so close to land."
"Candidly, I do not know," I strove to reassure her. "I wished
merely to prepare you for the worst, if the worst is to come. This
man, this captain, is a brute, a demon, and one can never tell what
will be his next fantastic act."
I was growing excited, but she interrupted me with an "Oh, I see,"
and her voice sounded weary. To think was patently an effort. She
was clearly on the verge of physical collapse.
She asked no further questions, and I vouchsafed no remark,
devoting myself to Wolf Larsen's command, which was to make her
comfortable. I bustled about in quite housewifely fashion,
procuring soothing lotions for her sunburn, raiding Wolf Larsen's
private stores for a bottle of port I knew to be there, and
directing Thomas Mugridge in the preparation of the spare state-
room.
The wind was freshening rapidly, the Ghost heeling over more and
more, and by the time the state-room was ready she was dashing
through the water at a lively clip. I had quite forgotten the
existence of Leach and Johnson, when suddenly, like a thunderclap,
"Boat ho!" came down the open companion-way. It was Smoke's
unmistakable voice, crying from the masthead. I shot a glance at
the woman, but she was leaning back in the arm-chair, her eyes
closed, unutterably tired. I doubted that she had heard, and I
resolved to prevent her seeing the brutality I knew would follow
the capture of the deserters. She was tired. Very good. She
should sleep.
There were swift commands on deck, a stamping of feet and a
slapping of reef-points as the Ghost shot into the wind and about
on the other tack. As she filled away and heeled, the arm-chair
began to slide across the cabin floor, and I sprang for it just in
time to prevent the rescued woman from being spilled out.
Her eyes were too heavy to suggest more than a hint of the sleepy
surprise that perplexed her as she looked up at me, and she half
stumbled, half tottered, as I led her to her cabin. Mugridge
grinned insinuatingly in my face as I shoved him out and ordered
him back to his galley work; and he won his revenge by spreading
glowing reports among the hunters as to what an excellent "lydy's-
myde" I was proving myself to be.
She leaned heavily against me, and I do believe that she had fallen
asleep again between the arm-chair and the state-room. This I
discovered when she nearly fell into the bunk during a sudden lurch
of the schooner. She aroused, smiled drowsily, and was off to
sleep again; and asleep I left her, under a heavy pair of sailor's
blankets, her head resting on a pillow I had appropriated from Wolf
Larsen's bunk. _
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