The schooner washed her nose in a curving billow that came inboard
and swept aft. With her small area of exposed sail and with the wind
buffeting her, she had halted and paid off, lacking steerageway. She got
several wallops of the same sort before she had gathered herself enough
to head into the wind.
Again she paid off, as if trying to avoid a volleying gust, and another
wave crested itself ahead of the blunt bows and then seemed to explode,
dropping tons of water on deck. Laths, lumber, and bunches of shingles
were ripped loose and went into the sea. The Polly appeared to be
showing sagacity of her own in that crisis; she was jettisoning cargo
for her own salvation.
"Good Cephas! this is going to lose us our decklo'd," wailed the master.
"We'd better let her run!" "Don't you do it, sir! You'll never get her
about!" Mayo had given over his work on the sail and was listening.
Above the scream of the passing gusts which assailed him he was hearing
a dull and solemn roar to windward. He suspected what that sound
indicated. He had heard it before in his experience. He tried to
peer into the driving storm, dragging the rain from his eyes with his
fingers. Then nature held a torch for him. A vivid shaft of lightning
crinkled overhead and spread a broad flare of illumination across the
sea. His suspicions, which had been stirred by that sullen roar, were
now verified. He saw a low wall of white water, rolling and frothing. It
was a summer "spitter" trampling the waves.
A spitter is a freak in a regular tempest--a midsummer madness of
weather upheaval. It is a thunderbolt of wind, a concentration of gale,
a whirling dervish of disaster--wind compactly bunched into one almighty
blast--wind enough to last a regular gale for a whole day if the stock
were spent thriftily.
"Don't ease her an inch!" screamed Mayo.
But just then another surging sea climbed aboard and picked up more of
the laths and more of the shingles, and frolicked away into the night
with the plunder. Captain Candage's sense of thrift got a more vital jab
than did his sense of fear. His eyes were on his wheel, and he had not
seen the wall of white spume.
"That decklo'd has got to be lashed," he muttered. He decided to run
with the wind till that work could be performed. He threw his helm hard
over. Mayo had been riding the main boom astraddle, hitching himself
toward the captain, to make him hear. When the volunteer saw the master
of the Polly trying to turn tail to the foe in that fashion, he leaped
to the wheel, but he was too late. The schooner had paid off too much.
The yelling spitter caught them as they were poised broadside on the top
of a wave, before the sluggish craft had made her full turn.