“I was wrong! She did not know. Now she never shall if I can prevent it.” Such were the words of Lucy’s husband when throwing away his cigar he arose to rejoin his young wife.
Many hundred miles from flowery Florida across a watery way, a ship was wildly tossing upon an angry, sullen sea. For three days and nights with ceaseless toil, in constant danger, the weary crew had battled with howling winds and tempestuous waves.
A storm of awe-inspiring fury had burst upon the good ship “Adams,” of Boston, bound for Melbourne, on the night of December the nineteenth in that good year of our Lord.
The superb seamanship of the skipper, combined with the prompt alacrity of the willing crew, alone saved the ship from adding her broken frame to that countless multitude which rest beneath the waves.
The wind was still blowing a gale, but there was perceptibly less force in it, as shrieking it tore through the rigging and against the almost bare masts, than there had been in three days.
Two men stood in the cabin, enveloped in oil-skins, with rubber boots reaching above their knees. Their eyes were red from wind and watching, while they answered the heave of the ship wearily as if worn out with the excessive labor of the last seventy-two hours. The men were the two mates of the “Adams.” The captain had sent them below for a glass of grog and a biscuit. There had been no fire in the galley for the three days that the storm had beaten upon the ship.
“The skipper must be made of iron,” said the shorter man, Morgan, the second officer.
“He has hardly left the deck a minute since the squall struck us, and he is as quick and strong as a shark,” he continued, munching on the biscuit and balancing himself carefully as he raised his glass of grog.
“Every inch a sailor is the skipper,” growled the larger man hoarsely.
“Sailed with Captain Dunlap in the ‘Lucy,’ and no better master ever trod a quarter-deck,” added Mr. Brice, the first officer of the “Adams.”