The Praying Skipper, and Other Stories

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

IV

Captain Kendrick had no more time to bother with such trifles as the outbreak of Valentine. Before this day had darkened the sky turned a dirty yellow, and the weight of the wind was not enough to account for the greasy, sluggish roll of the sea. The barometer needle slid unwaveringly toward the danger point, and after some uncertain shifting, the wind hauled to the northeast and grew steadily colder. Stripped of all superfluous gear on deck, the Suwannee was licked into fighting trim, gaunt, streaming and naked. The weeping drizzle that fogged the sky line changed to sleet, and soon after dusk came blinding snow with a great fury of wind.

When the captain faced the storm on his quivering bridge, he felt as if all breath and warmth were instantly blown out of him. No fleecy snowflakes these, but hooting volleys of icy shot, incessantly delivered. He groped along the canvased rail in a choking fight for breath until he found Mr. Carr. They gasped and flinched as they vainly tried to peer into the whirling smother.

The sea rose with incredible swiftness. Within the hour, the Suwannee could no longer be held on her course. Yawing wildly whenever a vicious onset of the sea smashed against her quarter and toppled on deck, the ship was brought round and hove to, dead into it. Then the racing of her screws shook her until it seemed as if the engines would tear her hull apart, and speed was slowed as much as the captain dared.

Mr. Parlin was still locked in his stateroom, and as the deep-laden Suwannee wrestled with the blizzard, Captain Kendrick argued in his mind whether the mutinous officer should be released at a time when all hands were sorely needed. The third officer had not been long enough promoted to shoulder any grave responsibility. In such a night as this, whose menace was hourly increasing, the vital issue was to safeguard the ship. But the captain's manhood rebelled against a compromise with his deed of clean-cut justice. And rankling in his heart was a damnable phrase, "prime of usefulness is past." It helped to give him the strength of two, now that the test had come, and he decided to fight it through with Peter Carr.

Before midnight the cold was so benumbing and deadly, without chance of respite, that freezing fast to the rail to which they clung was a fate that threatened master and mate. Each begged the other to seek a little warmth and shelter, and their indomitable wills were dead-locked time and again. At length the captain put it as a most emphatic command, and fairly hustled Peter Carr down the steps to the steam-heated wheelhouse. When the mate returned, hot with coffee and protestations that the captain take a turn below, the old man refused with a passionate gesture of finality.

Although he had striven to bank the fires of resentment, his thoughts burned like coals that callow youth, sitting in judgment, should have flung aside his faith and works together like so much trash. But never for a moment did such introspections relax his alert understanding of every symptom of the laboring tussle between ship and sea. So far she had come unhurt. Now, once, as she climbed wearily and hung for an instant like a giant see-saw, Captain Kendrick became tensely expectant as he felt through the planking a strange jarring break, somewhere down in her vitals.

Then, instead of splendidly crashing down the long slope into the hidden wrath of water, the Suwannee began to swing broadside as if on a pivot. The wild impulse was unchecked, even as her bow slanted into the tumbling barrier, and heaving far down to port, she rolled helpless and exposed, as a bewildered boxer drops the guard that shields his jaw from the knock-out blow.

"Hard over, hard over," yelled the captain down the tube to an empty wheelhouse, for a pallid quartermaster darted from within, and scrambled to the bridge, shouting:

"She won't steer, —— —— her, she won't steer. The gear has carried away below."

With one look to windward, the captain crawled to the engine-room indicator and sent clamoring signals to reverse the port and jam full speed ahead with the starboard screw. But before the Suwannee could feel the altered drive of her engines, so huge a sea raced over her lurching bow that the port side of the bridge crumpled under the attack like a wire bird-cage smashed with a club. Roaring aft, the gray flood ripped a string of boats from their lashings. It left their fragments absurdly dangling from the twisted davits, and poured through the cabin skylights, whose strength collapsed like pasteboard.

Peter Carr had seen the danger in time to shout a warning as he fled to the starboard end of the bridge. On top of him came the captain, washed along in a tangle of splintered oak and canvas. The mate crawled from beneath and looked for the quartermaster. A sodden bundle of oil-skins was doubled around a stanchion almost at his feet, and life was gone from the battered features. Instinctively glancing seaward, the mate noted that the Suwannee had responded to the send of her screws, and was veering now to port. He signaled to ease her, and as she headed into it again, he made a rush and dragged the skipper clear. The sleeted beard was matted with blood, but the old man stirred and opened his eyes.

"We've got to nurse her along with the engines," he muttered brokenly. "Thank God for twin screws. Stand by the indicator. Sing down for hands to clear the wreckage, and overhaul the steering-gear. It felt to me like the rudder went at the pintles. But have 'em man the hand-wheel aft."

He wiped the blood from his eyes, and strove to get on his feet. One leg gave way, and he hauled himself up by gripping what was left of the rail.

"It's gone back on me again," he groaned, "but it wasn't much of a leg at best. Lend a hand, and do as I tell ye."

Peter Carr passed a lashing around the skipper's waist, and so made him fast to the steel pillar of the engine-room indicator. Now began the infinitely wary coaxing of the ship to face the storm, now with a thrust of her port screw, again with a kick of her starboard screw. It was thus she must be steered, for word came up that there was no mending the damage this side of port. The mate was afraid to take over the task of keeping the ship headed into the storm, for this was his first experience in a twin-screw steamer, yet he was as much afraid that the skipper might die if he left him where he was.

The ship fought to wrest herself free from this shifting grip, she seemed eager to slay herself by swinging to take the seas abeam, but the man whose face and beard were dappled with blotches of crimson held her hove to, as if his soul had pervaded her clanking depths. When Peter Carr implored him to have his hurts cared for, the captain answered with such shattered murmurings as these, for the cold and the pain were biting into his brain:

"But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.... Let not the water-flood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up.... Oh, spare me that I may recover strength before I go hence and be no more.... Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them out of their distress...."

Peter Carr was a much younger man, and the violence of his exertions had so warmed his blood that he had much strength left in him. Now and then he tugged at the captain's arm, shouted in his ear, tried to lift him, and the third officer, who had come from the task of mending matters on deck, joined the heroic struggle. The captain awoke to chide them as if they were impatient boys, but his eyes saw only the swirling curtain of snow ahead and the great seas he must meet in their teeth. Suddenly he tried to stand erect, and shouted as he swayed:

"Vessel dead ahead."

With the words, he sent a signal to his engine-room, and the Suwannee shouldered the merest trifle off to port just as a great gray mass slid past, so close that the watchers smelled a whiff of steam. The blackness was beginning to fade out of the storm, day was breaking, and they glimpsed alongside a cluster of jackies toiling in flooding seas at hawsers lashed round two great turret guns. More than ever convinced by this escape that his eyes were needed on the bridge, Captain Kendrick stayed steadfast in his purpose. The two officers felt awe as they looked at him, that he should have sensed, where their eyes could not see, the danger they had shaved by a hair's breadth. Sometimes now his head fell forward, but the hand on the indicator lever was ever nervously alive to feel the ship and the raving seas, and he was snatching her from death, inch by inch and hour by hour.