There was a pause of sudden quiet, the quiet of forces gathering strength for fiercer assault; and in that pause I remembered something had flung over me in the wash of the breaking sea. I looked to the crosstrees. The mutineer was gone.
It was the first and last time that I have ever seen a smoking sea. The ocean boiled white. Far out in the wake of the tide that had caught us foam smoked on the track of the ploughing waters. Waters—did I say? You could not see waters for the spray.
Then Jean bade me look how the stays'l had been torn to flutters, and we both set about righting decks.
For all I could see, M. Radisson was simply holding the wheel; but the holding of a wheel in stress is mighty fine seamanship. To keep that old gallipot from shipping seas in the tempest of billows was a more ticklish task than rope-walking a whirlpool or sacking a city.
Presently came two sounds—a swish of seas at our stern and the booming of surf against coast rocks. Then M. de Radisson did the maddest thing that ever I have seen. Both sounds told of the coming tempest. The veering wind settled to a driving nor'easter, and M. de Radisson was steering straight as a bullet to the mark for that rock wall.
But I did not know that coast. When our ship was but three lengths from destruction the St. Pierre answered to the helm. Her prow rounded a sharp rock. Then the wind caught her, whirling her right about; but in she went, stern foremost, like a fish, between the narrow walls of a fiord to the quiet shelter of a land-locked lagoon. Pierre Radisson had taken refuge in what the sailors call "a hole in the wall."
There we lay close reefed, both anchors out, while the hurricane held high carnival on the outer sea.
After we had put the St. Pierre ship-shape, M. Radisson stationed Jean and me fore and aft with muskets levelled, and bade us shoot any man but himself who appeared above the hatch. Arming himself with his short, curved hanger—oh, I warrant there would have been a carving below decks had any one resisted him that day!—down he went to the mutineers of the dim-lighted forehold.
Perhaps the storm had quelled the spirit of rebellion; but up came M. de Radisson, followed by the entire crew—one fellow's head in white cotton where it had struck the floor, and every man jumping keen to answer his captain's word.
I must not forget a curious thing that happened as we lay at anchor. The storm had scarce abated when a strange ship poked her jib-boom across the entrance to the lagoon, followed by queer-rigged black sails.