“‘Beg pardon, sir,’ I yelled into the din.
“This time I managed to catch a word or two, but I could make nothing of it. It sounded like topgallantsails, but in spite of what had just happened I couldn’t believe my own ears.
“‘Are you deaf, or what’s the matter with you?’ yells the Old Man then. ‘That’s twice I’ve had occasion to repeat an order. Don’t let it occur again!’
“Well, off I struggled again forrard! ‘What price Bully Forbes of the “Marco Polo,”’ says I to myself; and I tried to fancy the old B.O.T. examiner’s face that passed me for second, if I’d answered his pet question, ‘Running before a gale, what would you do?’ with ‘Cram on more sail and chance it!’
“It took us a good ten minutes to make our way through the broken water on deck. We’d struggle forward a few yards, then—flop!—would come a big green one over the rail and send us all jumping for our lives—on again, and over would come another; still we got there at last, and after a bit we managed to set the sail. Then came the big tussle, at the braces up to our necks in water! More than once I thought we were all gone; but at last everything was O.K., gear turned up and all, and we hung on to windward as well as we could and put up a silent prayer—at least I know I did—that the Old Man wouldn’t take it into his head to fly any more kites just yet.
“I’d always rather envied the fellows who were at sea twenty years or so before my time—the chaps who had such wonderful yarns to tell about the dare-devil skippers and the incredible cracking on in the China tea ships and the big American clippers. Well, I don’t mind owning I was getting all of it I wanted for once!
“Mind you, it didn’t worry me any! On the whole, I liked it. I was a youngster, with no best girl or anything of that sort to trouble about, and I enjoyed it. There was something so wonderfully fine and exciting in the feel of the thing, even when you knew at the back of your mind that she might go to glory any minute and take the whole blessed shooting-match along with her. But there wasn’t much time to worry about details like that; and anyhow, after a certain point you just get beyond thinking about them one way or the other. It’s all in the day’s work, and there you are!
“But our precious mate, I must tell you, didn’t like it a bit—not a little bit! He was a fellow called Arnot, rather a poisonous little bounder; I guess he’d none too much nerve to start with, and he’d played the dickens with what he had while we were in Iquique, running after what he called “skirts” and soaking aguardiente. The skipper’s carrying on got on his nerves frightfully. He was scared stiff. He went about dropping dark hints about barratry, and chucking the ship away, and he wasn’t the man to hold his tongue if he ever got back to England, and so on. He used to buttonhole me whenever we met and start burbling away about the Old Man being out of his mind.
“I ran bung into him one day as I came out of my room. It was blowing like the dickens and the ship tearing along hell-for-leather. I won’t say what sail she was carrying, because I don’t want to get the name of being a liar. She was a wonderful old ship to steer (I hardly ever knew her need a lee wheel) or she could never have kept going as she did under all that canvas. If she’d once got off her course it would have been God help her!
“Mister Mate and I did one or two impromptu dance steps in each other’s arms before we got straightened up again. I noticed two things about him while we were thus engaged. One was that by the smell of him he’d been imbibing a drop of Dutch courage from a private store I suspected he kept in his room—the other that he was fairly shaking with fright.