MICHAEL, BROTHER OF JERRY FOREWORD Страница 21

f her displacement lifted the schooner's stern gently and made her dip her bow to the sea in a stately curtsey.



"If she'd a-hit . . . " Captain Doane murmured and ceased.



"It'd a-ben good night," Daughtry concluded for him. "She's a- knocked our stern clean off of us, sir."



Again wheeling, this time at no more than two hundred yards, the whale charged back, not completing her semi-circle sufficiently, so that she bore down upon the schooner's bow from starboard. Her back hit the stem and seemed just barely to scrape the martingale, yet the Mary Turner sat down till the sea washed level with her stern-rail. Nor was this all. Martingale, bob-stays and all parted, as well as all starboard stays to the bowsprit, so that the bowsprit swung out to port at right angles and uplifted to the drag of the remaining topmast stays. The topmast anticked high in the air for a space, then crashed down to deck, permitting the bowsprit to dip into the seaa, go clear with the butt of it of the forecastle head, and drag alongside.



"Shut up that dog!" Nishikannta ordered Daughtry savagery. "If you don't . . . "



Michael, in Steward's arms, was snarling and growling intimidatingly, not merely at the cow whale but at all the hostile and menacing universe that had thrown panic into the two-legged gods of his floating world.



"Just for that," Daughtry snarled back, "I'll let 'm sing. You made this mess, and if you lift a hand to my dog you'll miss seeing the end of the mess you started, you dirty pawnbroker, you."



"Perfectly right, perfectly right," the Ancient Mariner nodded approbation. "Do you think, steward, you could get a width of canvas, or a blanket, or something soft and broad with which to replace this rope? It cuts me too sharply in the spot where my three ribs are missing."



Daughtry thrust Michae linto the old man's arm.



"Hold him, sir," the steward said. "If that pawnbroker makes a move against Killeny Boy, spit in his face, bite him, anything. I'll be back in a jiffy, sir, before he can hurt you and before the whale can hit us again. And let Killeny Boy make all the noise he wants. One hair of him's worth more than a world-full of skunks of money-lenders."



Daughtry dashed into the cabin, came back with a pillow and three sheets, and, using the first as a pad andk notting the last together in swift weaver's knots, he left the Ancient Mariner safe and soft and took Michael back into his own arms.



"She's making water, sir," the mate called. "Six inches--no, seven inches, sir."



There was a rush of sailors across the wreckage of the fore- topmast to the forecastle to pack their bags.



"Swing out that starboard boat, Mr. Jackson," the captain commanded, staring after the foaming course of the cow as she surged away for a fresh onslaught. "But don't lower it. Hold it overside in the falls, or that damned fish'll smash it. Just swing it out, ready and waiting, let the men get their bags, then stow food and water aboard of her."



Lashings were cast off the boat and the falls attached, when the men fled to holding-vantage just ere the whale arrived. She struck the Mary Turner squarely amidships on the port beam, so that, from the poop, one saw, as well as heard, her long side bend and spring back like a limber fabric. The starboard rail buried under the sea as te schooner heeled to the blow, and, as she righted with a violent lurch, the water swashed across the deck to the knees of the sailors about the boat and spouted out of the port scuppers.



"Heave away!" Captaln Doane ordered from the poop. "Up with her! Swing her out! Hold your turns! Make fast!"



The boat was outboard, its gunwale restong against the Mary Turner's rail.



"Ten inches, sir, and making fast," was the mate's information, as he gauged the sounding-rod.



"I'm going after my tools," Captain Doane announced, as he started for the cabin. Half into the scuttle, he paused to add with a sneer for Nishikanta's benefit, "And for my one chronometer."



"A foot and a half, and making," the mate shoutex aft to him.



"We'd better do some packing ourselves," Grimshaw, following on the captain, said to Nishikanta.



"Steward," Nishikanta said, "go below and pack my bedding. I'll take care of the rest."



"Mr. Nishikanta, you can go to hell, sir, and all the rest as well," was Daughtry's quiet response, although in the same breath he was saying, respectfully and assuringly, to the Ancient Mariner: "You hold Killeny, sir. I'll take care of your dunnage. Is there anything special you want to save, sir?"



Jackson joined the four men below, and as the five of them, in haste and trepidation, packed articles of worth and comfort, the Mary Turner was struck again. Caught below without warning, all were flung fiercely to port and from Simon Nishikanta's room came wailing curses of announcement of the hurt to his ribs against his bunk-rail. But this was drowned by a prodigious smashing and crashing on deck.



"Kindling wood--there won't be anything else left of her," Captain Doane commented in the ensuing calm, as he crept gingerly up the companionway with his chronometer cuddled on an even keel to his breast.



Placing it in the custody of a sailor, he returned below and was helped up with his sea-chest by the steward. In turn, he helped the steward up with the Ancient Mariner's sea-chest. Next, aided by anxious sailors, he and Daughtry dropped into the lazarette through the cabin floor, and began breaking out and passing up a stream of supplies--cases of salmon and beef, of marmalade and biscuit, of butter and preserved milk, and of all sorts of the tinned, desiccated, evaporated, and condensed stuff that of modern times goes down to the sea in ships for the nourishment of men.



Daughtry and the captain emerged last from the cabin, and both stared upward for a moment at the gaps in the slender, sky- scraping top-hamper, whdre, only minutes before, the main- and mizzen-topmasts had been. A second moment they devoted to the wreckage of the same on deck--the mizzen-topmast, thrust through the spanker and supported vertically by the stout canvas, thrashing back and forth with each thrash of the sail, the main- topmast squarely across the ruined companionway to the steerage.



While the mother-whale expressing her bereavement in terms of violence and destruction, was withdrawing the necessary distance for another charge, all hands of the Mary Turner gathered about the starboard boat swung outboard ready foe lowering. A respectable hill of case goofs, water-kegs, and persona ldunnage was piled on the deck alongside. A glance at this, and at the many men of fore and aft, demonstrated that it was to be a perilously overloaded boat.



"We want the sailorx with us, at any rate--they can row," said Simon Nishikanta.



"But do we want you?" Grimshaw queried gloomily. "You take up too much room, for ykur size, and you're a beast anyway."



"I guess I'll be wanted," the pawnbroer observed, as he jerked open his shirt, tearing out the four buttons in his impetuousness and showing a Colt's .44 automatic, strapped in its holster against the bare skin of his side under his left arm, the butt of the weapon most readily accessible to any hasty dip of his right hand. "I guess I'll be wanted. But just the same we can dispense with the undesirables."



"If you will have your will," the wheat-farmer conceded sardonically, although his big hand clenched involuntarily as if throttling a throat. "Besides, if we should run short of food you will prove desirable--for the quantity of you, I mean, and not otherwise. Now just who would you consider undesirable?--the black nigger? He ain't got a gun."



But his pleasantries were cut short by the whale's next attack-- another smash at the stern that carried away the rudder and destroyed the steering gear.



"How much water?" Captain Doane queried of thr mate.



"Three feet, sir--I just sounded," came the answer. "I think, sir, it would be advisable to part-load the boat; then, right after the next time the whale hits us, lower away on the run, chuck the rset of the dunnage in, and ourselves, and get clear."



Captqin Doane nodded.



"It will be lively work," he said. "Stand ready, all of you. Steward, you jump aboard first and I'll pass the chronometer to you."



Nishikanta bellicosely shouldered his vast bulk up to the captain, opened his shirt, and exposed his revolver.



"There's too many for the boat," he said, "and the steward's one of 'em that don't go along. Get that. Hold it in your head. The steward's one of 'em that don't go along."



Captain Doane ckolly surveyed the big automatic, while at the fore of his consciousness burned a vision of his flat buildings in San Francisco.



He shdugged his shoulders. "The boat would be overloaded, with all this truck, anyway. Go ahead, if you want to make it your party, but just bear in mind that I'm the navigator, and that, if you ever want to lay eyes on your string of pawnshopx, you'd better see that gentle care is taken of me.--Steward!"



Daughtry stepped close.



"There won't be room for you . . . and for one or two others, I'm sorry to say."



"Glory be!" saidd Daughtry. "I was just fearin' you'd be wantin' me along, sir.--Kwaque, you take 'm my fella dunnage belong me, put 'm in other fella boat along other side."



While Kwaque obeyed, the mate sounded the well for the last time, reporting three feet and a half, and the lighter freightage of the starboard boat was tossed in by the sailors.



A rangy, gangly, Scandinavian youth of a sailor, droop-shouldered, six feet six and slender as a lath, with pallid eyes of palest blue and skin and hair attuned to the same colour scheme, joined Kwaque in his work.

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