LITMIR.BIZ

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“But it was funny, Stokes; deuced funny, I tell you, ‘ho-ho-ho!’ ” rejoined the skipper, bursting out into a regular roar again at the recollection of the scene, his jolly laugh causing even the cause of it to smile against his will. “However, there’s an end of it, gudgeon pin and all. Now, about that stoke-hold of yours. It’s flooded, you say?”

       “Aye; there’s eighteen inches of water there now, right up to the footplates,” said the engineer with a grave air. “The bilge-pumps won’t act, and all my staff of stokers are so busy keeping up the steam that I can’t spare a man to see to clearing out the suctions, though if the water rises any higher, it will soon be up to the furnace bars and put out the fires.”

       “Humph, that’s serious,” answered the skipper meditatively. “I’ll see what I can do to help you. I say, Fosset?”

       “Aye, aye, sir! Want me?”

       “Yes,” replied the skipper. “Mr. Stokes is shorthanded below and says the bilge-pumps are choked. Can you spare him a man or two to help clear the suctions? I daresay there’s a lot of stray dunnage washing about under the stoke-hold plates. You might go down and bear a hand yourself, as I won’t leave the bridge.”

       “Certainly, sir; I’ll go at once with Mr. Stokes and take some of the starboard watch with me. It’s close on seven bells and they’d soon have to turn out, anyway, to relieve the men now on deck.”

       “That’ll do very well, Fosset,” said the skipper, and, raising his voice, he shouted over the rail forwards—

       “Bosun, call the watch!”

       Bill Masters, who had been waiting handy on the deck amidships, immediately below the bridge, expecting some such order with the need, as he thought, of the skipper reducing sail, at once stuck his shrill boatswain’s pipe to his lips and gave the customary call: Whee-ee-oo-oo—whee-ee-ee.

       “Starboard watch, ahoy!”

       The men came tumbling out of the fo’c’s’le at the sound of the whistle and the old seadog’s stentorian hail; whereupon the first mate, selecting six of the lot to accompany him, he followed Mr. Stokes towards the engine-room hatchway.

       Before disappearing below, however, the engineer made a last appeal to the skipper.

       “I say, cap’en,” he sang out, stopping half-way as he toddled aft, somewhat disconsolately in spite of the assistance given him, “now won’t you ease down, sir, just to oblige me? The engines won’t stand it, sir; and it’s my duty to tell you so, sir.”

       “All right, Stokes; you’ve told me, and may consider that you’ve done your duty in doing so,” replied the skipper, grimly laconic. “But I’m not going to ease down till seven bells, my hearty, unless we run across Dick Haldane’s ship before, when we’ll go as slow as you like and bear up again on our course to the westwards.”

       “Very good, sir,” answered the old chief as he lifted his podgy legs over the coaming of the hatchway, prior to burying himself in the cimmerian darkness of the opening, wherein Mr. Fosset and his men had already vanished.

       “I’ll make things all snug below, sir, and bank the fires as soon as you give the signal.”

       With that, he, too, was lost to sight.

       The skipper, I could see, was not very easy in his mind when left alone; for he paced jerkily to and fro between the wheel-house and the weather end of the bridge as well as he was able, the vessel being very unsteady, rolling about among the big rollers like a huge grampus and pitching almost bows under water sometimes, though the old barquey was buoyant enough, notwithstanding the lot of deadweight she carried in her bowels, rising up after each plunge as frisky as a cork, when she would shake herself with a movement that made her tremble all over, as if to get rid of the loose spray and spindrift that hung on to her shining black head, and which the wind swept before it like flecks of snow into the rigging, spattering and spattering against the almost red-hot funnels up which the steam blast was rushing mingled with the flare of the funnels below.

       After continuing his restless walk for a minute or two, the skipper stopped by the binnacle, looking at the compass card, which moved about as restlessly as the old barquey and himself, oscillating in every direction.

       “We ought to have come up with her by now, Haldane,” he said, addressing me, as I stood with Spokeshave on the other side of the wheel-house. “Don’t you think so from the course she was going when you sighted her?”

       “Yes, sir,” I answered, “if she hasn’t gone down!”

       “I hope not, my boy,” said he; “but I’m very much afraid she has, or else we’ve passed ahead of her.”

       “That’s not likely, sir,” I replied. “She looked as if crossing our track when I last saw her; and, though we were going slower then, we must be gaining on her now, I should think.”

       “We ought to be,” said he. “We must be going seventeen knots at the least with wind and steam.”

       “Aye, aye, sir, all that,” corroborated old Masters, the boatswain, who had come up on the bridge unnoticed. “Beg pardon, sir, but we can’t carry on much longer with all that sail forrad. The fore-topmast is a-complainin’ like anythink, I can tell ye, sir. Chirvell, the carpenter, and me’s examinin’ it and we thinks it’s got sprung at the cap, sir.”

       “If that’s the case, my man,” said Captain Applegarth to this, “we’d better take in sail at once. It’s a pity, too, with such a fine wind. I was just going to spare the engines and ease down for a bit, trusting to our sails alone, but if there’s any risk of the spars going, as you say, wrong, we must reduce our canvas instead.”

       “There’s no help for it, sir,” returned the boatswain quickly. “Either one or t’other must go! Shall I pass the word, sir, to take in sail?”

       “Aye, take in the rags!”

       “Fo’c’s’le, ahoy there!” yelled Masters instantly, taking advantage of the long-desired permission. “All hands take in sail!”

       We had hauled the trysails and other fore and aft canvas, which was comparatively useless to a steamer when running before the wind at the time we had altered course towards the south, in quest of the ship in distress, the Star of the North speeding along with only her fore-topsail and fore-topgallantsail set in addition to her fore-topmast staysail and mizzen staysail and jib.

       The gale, however, had increased so much, the wind freshening as it shifted more and more to the north that this sail was too much for her, the canvas bellying out, and the upper spars “buckling” as the vessel laboured in the heavy sea, the stays taut as fiddle-strings and everything at the utmost tension.

       The skipper perceived this now, when almost too late.

       “Let go your topgallant bowline, and lee sheet and halliards,” he roared out, holding on with both hands to the rail and bending over the bridge cloth as he shouted to the men forward who had tumbled out of the forecastle on the boatswain’s warning hail. “Stand by your clewlines and by your boat lines!”

       The men sprang to the ropes with a will, but ere they had begun to cast them off from the cleats an ominous sound was heard from aloft, and, splitting from clew to earring, our poor topgallantsail blew clean out of the boltropes with a loud crack as if a gun had been fired off, the fragments floating away ahead of us, borne on the wings of the wind like a huge kite, until it disappeared in the dark chiaraoscura of the distant horizon, where heaven and sea met amid the shadows of night.

       Just then a most wonderful thing happened to startle us further!

       While all of us gazed at the wreck aloft, expecting the topsail to follow suit before it could be pulled, though the hands were racing up rigging for the purpose, the halliards having been at once let go and the yard lowered, a strange light over the topsail made us look aft, when we saw a huge ball of fire pass slowly across the zenith from the east to the west, illuminating not only the northern

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