As I lay there pinned to the deck, too helpless to even call aloud, and as it seemed waiting, waiting, for the executioner to spring the deadly trap, I was conscious that the door of the companion-way had closed with a bang so terrific that it sounded above the storm. I twisted my head and shoulders around to see if I dared to hope. There before me stood the Hindoo stowaway. He did not notice me lying there pinned under the wheel-box, nor could I manage to attract his attention.
With opal eyes glowing green and fiery red, he sprang to the wheel, and with magnificent strength pulled on the spokes till they screeched louder than the storm as they were dislodged from their oxidized fittings. Harder and harder he pulled on the wheel. He didn't even notice the seas breaking over him. The mysterious thing about him was that he seemed to know what he was doing. He was keeping her off before it.
In doing this he removed the tiller from my legs. At last I was free. As I struggled and crawled to the weather-rail for support, the Hindoo shouted in clear and ringing tones, in true seamanlike fashion, looking neither to the right nor left, but straight ahead, as if staring into a land-locked harbor. He repeated his order for the second time in a high tenor voice:
"Get an axe out of the donkey-room and cut away the lee martingale guy. Your flying-jibboom is gone overboard and is still held by the lee guy. It is plowing a hole in the port bow."
I knew but one law. The law of self-preservation. My arms were locked tight around the stanchion that supported the weather-rail. That quick command of the Hindoo brought me sharply to the realization that I was not yet given that quick despatch to the land of nowhere, but was still in the flesh, and very much alive. My first rational thought was, "What in Hell is the Hindoo doing at the wheel?" My pride as a sailor resented the affront put upon my ability as a sailor by a stowaway who was daring to assume the command of my ship, and daring to issue orders to me.
Letting go my hold on the stanchion, I cautiously made for the Hindoo helmsman. While in the act, she shipped another drencher. I was carried off my feet and washed away to the lee scuppers. But I managed, by some interposition of Divine Providence, to fasten my arms around the mooring-bitt, thus saving myself from an angry and cruel sea, which seemed to delight in playing with me as a cat does with a mouse, only to swallow me up in its fathomless depths.
Once again she wrenched herself free of the mad swirl and her stern went down until we were in a valley between mountains of water. I realized as I looked up at the bows which seemed to be towering above me, that the flying-jibboom, like a clipped wing, was missing. Like a flash I wondered how the Hindoo knew that the jibboom was gone.
As her stern ascended high into the air, I jumped for the wheel and with an exclamation of joy I shouted, "God in Heaven, the Captain!"
There he stood beside the Hindoo. The dead Captain. The same heavy mustache covered the lower lip. The same fiery eyes that knew no defeat. He was looking straight ahead with muscle-set jaws. He appeared as if in the flesh and ready as of yore to battle with the elements.
Then, like a flash, he vanished, and the Hindoo stood alone, pulling and tugging on the wheel with his supple arms.