One or two grumbled. Half a day’s work meant half a day’s pay to them. It was all very well for the Cap’n, who drew his by the week.
“Come, look alive!” Taffy called sharply. He pinned his faith to the barometer, and as he shut it in its case he glanced at the brigantine and saw that her crew were busy with the braces, flattening the forward canvas. “See there, boys. There’ll be a gale from the west’ard before night.”
For a minute the brigantine seemed to have run into a calm. The schooner, half a mile behind her, came reaching along steadily.
“That there two-master’s got a fool for a skipper,” grumbled a voice. But almost at the moment the wind took her right aback—or would have done so had the crew not been preparing for it. Her stern swung slowly around into view, and within two minutes she was fetching away from them on the port tack, her sails hauled closer and closer as she went. Already the schooner was preparing to follow suit.
“Snug down, boys! We must be out of this in half an hour.”
And sure enough, by the time Taffy gained the cliff by the old light-house, the sky had darkened, and a stiff breeze from the north-west, crossing the tide, was beginning to work up a nasty sea around the rock and lop it from time to time over the masonry and the platforms where half an hour before his men had been standing. The two vessels had disappeared in the weather; and as Taffy stared in their direction a spit of rain—the first—took him viciously in the face.
He turned his back to it and hurried homeward. As he passed the light-house door old Pezzack called out to him:
“Hi! wait a bit! Would ’ee mind seein’ Joey home? I dunno what his mother sent him over here for, not I. He’ll get hisself leakin’.”
Joey came hobbling out, and put his right hand in Taffy’s with the fist doubled.
“What’s that in your hand?”