CHAPTER VI.
BREAKERS AHEAD!
When I asked Brill how long the storm was likely to hold he gave me small encouragement.
“I've knowed 'em to blow like this till you'd think there wa'n't never goin' to be no let-up,” he said, adding: “I ain't noticed the glass risin' any yet.”
A glance at the compass showed that our course had changed completely. As we had been driving directly before the wind ever since the storm had struck us we had been obliged to go wherever we were sent; the sending now was in a southeasterly direction, which proved that the wind had shifted a full third of the way around the circle at some time during the night. Our changed course must, I thought, inevitably wreck us upon the western extremity of Cuba if we should keep on and I spoke of this to Brill.
“Needn't lose no sleep about that,” was his reply. “The shift o' wind didn't come till just a little afore day and by that time I reckon we'd left Cape San Antonio a ways astern.”
“In that case, what land will we make first if we keep on driving?”
“Huh!” he snorted, “your guess is as good as anybody's. The way we're headin' now we've got the hull derned Caribbean ahead of us. I do' know no more'n a goat where we're at and I won't know till I can get a chance to shoot the sun.”
The whole Caribbean! I thought of the scanty provision in the galley lockers, with five men to be fed. And until the storm should abate enough to let us make sail we were completely at the mercy of the fates, compelled to go wherever the pouring blast should blow us.
Now the life of a construction engineer, as everybody knows, is never any too thickly crowded with creature comforts, but in all of my twenty-seven years I had never put in such a wretched day as this we tholed through from daybreak to dark. Though less cyclonic than it had been during the night the wind continued to blow a tremendous gale, the sea ran mountain high and the atmosphere was so thick with cloud and scud and spindrift that at no time were we able to see more than a few hundred yards in any direction.
Under such conditions life aboard our chip of a vessel was merely endurance. The man at the wheel had to be lashed at his post and though we continued to tear along at express speed under our patch of stay sail and the kick of the motor, only eternal vigilance at the helm kept the towering following seas from broaching us. Naturally, with a total lack of nautical skill I was useless at the steering job, though time and again I offered to take a chance and relieve the three who were pretty thoroughly done in under the long strain. But Brill wouldn't trust me.
“No,” was his stereotyped objection; “I reckon you've got the nerve all right, but you ain't got the 'know it.' We're right side up yet and I ain't got no notion o' lettin' a landsman drowned me at the finish.”
Debarred thus from taking any useful part in the handling of the schooner I did what little else there was to be done; looked after the motor, prepared the scanty meals and served them and redressed Dorgan's scalp wound, which I was glad to note showed no signs of infection. Helpless with his broken arm and suffering, as I made no doubt, from the pain of his hurts and the pitching and tossing of the vessel which gave him no chance to relax and lie easily the big man was singularly good-natured in a grim fashion. While I was putting the clean bandages on his head he asked me what about that story of Wickham Jeffreys'—that I was in danger of going to the penitentiary.
“It was a lie cut out of the whole cloth,” I told him. “Did you believe it at the time?”
“Well, it did sound sort o' fishy,” he confessed. “Was there somethin' else back of it?”
I thought no harm could come of telling him the simple truth.
“He wants to marry the woman I want to marry and I was in his way.”
“Well, now!” rumbled the giant; “ain't that hell and repeat? If you'd only told me there was a woman in it”
“Your sandbag didn't give me a chance,” I interrupted. “And if I had been allowed to tell you, you wouldn't have believed me.”
“Nothin' so sure about that,” he protested. “I'm kinda mushy when you work the woman racket on me. She was in the yacht with that smooth-talkin' double crosser?”
“It is her father's yacht,” I explained. “She is one of the party on board.”
“Huh! I don't blame you none for raisin' merry hell a-tryin' to get back to where you belonged. Too bad she's drownded. I reckon it'd 'a' been some comfort if you could 'a' drownded along with her.”
“You seem to be mighty confident that the yacht hasn't outlived the storm.”
“Yacht may be all right but I know them white-collar skippers,” he said. “But I reckon it don't matter so much, after all; you'll likely be drownded on the same day o' the month with her, anyhow.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Isra'l says this here storm's one o' them circulars and he's scared we're a-workin' to'ards the center of it. If so be we are, you can tell all the home folks good-by. The old hooker'll never live past the shift o' wind that comes when you hit the suck hole of a twister.”
Landsman as I was I knew that Dorgan wasn't drawing upon his imagination in predicting the almost certain fate of a ship drawn into the vortex of a circular hurricane. Was that to be the end of us? I wondered. And when I thought of the fate which Dorgan had so confidently measured out to the Waikiki and her company I was not so deeply moved over the prospect for the Vesta as I might otherwise have been.
When night fell—it was only a change from twilight to full darkness, as you might say—the gale was still at its height and from all appearances we were in for another night of peril. By this time the terrific pitching and tossing had become a keen agony to all of us; more, since the Vesta was by no means a new vessel, her seams were opening badly under the continued racking. All during the afternoon I had been forced to run the bilge pump at intervals to keep the leakage down and I remarked with increasing concern that the intervals grew shorter toward night.
This meant that I had my night's work cut out for me in the engine hold if the schooner was to be kept from foundering, but before attacking it I took Dorgan's supper down to him and tried to make him as comfortable for the night as the conditions would admit. As I was leaving him he called me back and thrusting his good arm under his blanket pillow drew out a sailor's ditty bag and gave it to me.
“If you come alive out o' this and I don't—and you stand a heap better chance than what I do—there's a li'l' woman up in Jacksonville that belongs to me; you can find her by askin' for Tom Beasley, Clyde Line dock. You swipe your watch and money out o' that bag, along with the yellow-back cent'ry his nobs paid me for kidnapin' you, and give what's left to the li'l' woman. It's all I got.”
I don't believe I'm any too soft-hearted and Dorgan's treatment of me before his beating had not been calculated to make me love him. But the finding of this streak of sheer humanity in him got me.
“Dorgan,” I said, “you're not altogether the brute I've been taking you for, after all. I owe you an apology because I've been thinking you were. Be sure that I'll do what you ask—if I should live and you don't. And the hide goes with the horns; the little woman you speak of gets the hundred-dollar bribe with the rest of your estate.”
“That's right white of you; I'm damned if it ain't,” he said simply; and with that he turned his face to the wall and I went to tackle the all-night pumping job in the engine hold.
There was a good six-inch depth of water sloshing back and forth in the machinery den when I dropped into it and a little longer delay on my part would have put the motor' out of commission. I started the pump at once but it was a long time before I could tell whether or not it was gaining anything on the leaks. Perched on the cracker box I got a little sleep now and again but it was a long night and a trying one. Having to stick grimly to my post I was obliged to leave the deck to Brill and the Minorcans; but while I didn't trust Brill at all I thought I could depend upon my two allies to hold him harmless if he should try to regain the upper hand.
Along toward morning the pitching and tossing grew less violent and I began to hope that the worst was over. Anxiously I watched the open hatchway to catch the first glimmerings of dawn but I missed them after all, for I was sound asleep on my perch when Brill's shout, calling me to turn out, aroused me. Startled by the note of fear in his voice I sprang up, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. The new day was come; there was blue sky overhead and the sun was shining.
But there was another shock of surprise lying in wait for me when I tumbled up the ladder. Brill was at the wheel, the wind had subsided to half a gale and though the waves were still running high the schooner was laboring less heavily. Yet it seemed that we had escaped foundering at sea only to be wrecked at last. Dead ahead and so near that the thunder of the breakers upon an outer reef beat upon the ear like the booming of cannon there was land. Though Brill was doing his best to claw off with the help of the patch of staysail it was evident that the wind, the seas and a strong tidal current were driving us helplessly upon the reef.
This was why Brill had yelled to me. Pedro and José were fighting desperately with the water-soaked lashings of the furled foresail and I understood at once that if we were to have any chance at all to save the schooner it would only be by making sail and making it mighty quickly. In the pitching surges the motor was barely giving us weak steerage way.
In the hot work of the next few minutes my heart was in my mouth. At every lift of the ship I expected her to come crashing down upon the reef. Working like fiends we three finally contrived to cast off the wet lashings of the foresail and to hoist and sheet it home. With this additional canvas spread, Israel Brill proved that even the paltriest villain may have some redeeming qualities. With a quick spin of the wheel that brought the schooner up when she was within half a length of the breakers he averted the catastrophe for the moment, at least. But this was only a stop-gap that served to lay us broadside on to the rocks.
“Head sails!” Brill yelled. “Shake the reefs out o' that stays'l! Jump to it for your lives!”
We jumped and after a breathless tussle with wet and swollen ropes the staysail was hoisted. Brill put the helm hard up and I fell into the engine hold to speed the motor to its limit, climbing out again immediately to lend a hand with the wheel. But in spite of all our efforts the schooner continued to edge in toward the crash. Doing his best Brill could only hold her on a course roughly paralleling the reef and we all saw that it needed nothing but the urge of an extra heavy sea to send us to our finish.
It was then that I remembered Dorgan lying crippled in his berth between decks. Shouting to José to come and take my place as an extra hand at the wheel I dashed down into the stuffy little dog kennel of a cabin. Dorgan was sitting on the edge of the bunk, blinking dizzily from the effort of getting up. He knew something was wrong but was too bewildered to realize what it was.
“All hands on deck!” I shouted. “We're about to go on the rocks!”
“I reckoned it was something like that,” he muttered and with my help he got upon his feet. Half leading, half carrying him I got him up the companion steps. There were half a dozen life belts on the ship but they were all rotten and frayed and ready to drop to pieces. I picked out the best one and tied it around him as he sat on the deck with his back braced against the deck house and he gave me a grateful look like that of a dog out of whose paw you have just pulled a festering thorn, saying: “You're the first white man I've knowed in a month o' Sundays; you look out for yourself and that li'l' poke I give you and never mind me.”
As he spoke the big seventh wave we had all been watching for came surging in froth topped and mountain high from wind ward. I had a fleeting glimpse of Pedro wrapping legs and arms around the weather shrouds of the mainmast for an anchorage against the shock, of Brill shoving José away from the wheel and bending his thick body to spin the spokes, of the schooner rising on the huge billow to turn slowly head on to the reef as Brill put the helm hard down, and then—
The expected crash did not come. Instead, there was a long, scraping grind as the ship, lifted high on the insweeping surge, barely cleared the jagged coral, shot across the inner lagoon, buried her forefoot in the sand of a white beach and broke her bowsprit short off in collision with the palm trees that grew almost down to the water's edge. Brill had taken the only chance that offered, which was that the big sea would carry the Vesta completely over the breaker barrier. And it had.