"When these old critters once get loose enough to play they rattle to
pieces mighty fast," said the mate. "But this is nothing specially bad."
"Find out what we've got under us," snapped Captain Downs. The wedges
had been driven. "Let this nigger carry the lead for'ard!"
It was a difficult task in the night, because the leadline had to be
passed from the quarter-deck to the cathead outside the shrouds; the
rails and deck were slippery. Plainly, Captain Downs was proposing to
show Mayo "a thing or two."
He let go the lead at command, and heard the man on the quarter-deck,
catching the line when it swung into a perpendicular position, report
twenty-five fathoms.
Again, answering the mate's bawled orders, Mayo carried the lead forward
and dropped it, after a period of waiting, during which the schooner
had been eased off. He was soaked to the skin, and was miserable in both
body and mind. He had betrayed himself, he had made an enemy of the man
who knew something which could help him; he felt a queer sense of shame
and despair when he remembered the girl and the expression of her face.
He tried to convince himself that he did not care what her opinion
of him was. What happened to that love she had professed on board the
Olenia? What manner of maiden was this? He did not understand!
Five times he made his precarious trip with the lead, fumbling his way
outside the rigging.
In twenty fathoms Captain Downs decided to anchor, after the mate,
"arming" the lead by filling its cup with grease, found that they were
over good holding ground.
When the Alden came into the wind and slowed down, slapping wet
sails, the second mate hammered out the holding-pin of the gigantic port
anchor, and the hawse-hole belched fathom after fathom of chain.
All hands were on deck letting sails go on the run into the lazy-jacks,
and the big schooner swung broadside to the trough of the sea. She made
a mighty pendulum, rolling rails under, sawing the black skies with her
towering masts.
There are many things which can happen aboard a schooner in that
position when men are either slow or stupid. A big negro who was paying
out the mizzen-peak halyards allowed his line to foul. Into the triangle
of sail the wind volleyed, and the thirty-foot mizzen-boom, the roll
of the ship helping, swung as far as its loosened sheets allowed. The
"traveler," an iron hoop encircling a long bar of iron fastened at both
ends to the deck, struck sparks as a trolley pulley produces fire from a
sleety wire.