First we heard Willie yelling with all the power of his brazen little throat; then the cabin door was flung open with a bang; then suddenly Willie and the monkey literally flew out of the companionway and alighted on deck.
The fall was short and neither was much hurt. But when each tried to escape from the other, both started to run in the same direction and Willie, tripping, fell on the monkey. At that, the monkey grabbed Willie's head with its front claws, raked its hind claws across his face, then snatching out two good handfuls of hair, fled triumphantly aloft.
Gleazen burst out on deck at that very instant, and seeing nothing of Willie who—luckily for him!—had fallen out of sight round the corner of the cabin, started into the rigging, swearing to skin the monkey alive.
Meanwhile Matterson was like to have died laughing at Willie MacDougald,—and, indeed, so were the rest of us!—for between anger and fear, and with half a dozen long scratches across his cheeks, he was in a sad state of mind. I tell you, any ideas of his innocent childhood that we may have entertained completely vanished before the flood of oaths that the little wretch was pouring out, when Gideon North collared him and sent him below with stinging ears.
And now, since all that takes so long to tell happened quickly, the breakers were close aboard, when Gleazen, who had followed the scapegrace monkey to the mizzen royal yard, roared in that great voice of his:—
"Sail ho! By heaven, there's a cruiser in the offing."
He came down the rigging like a cat, bawling orders as he came, and at the same time Gideon North was giving counter-orders. It seemed for a moment that in that scene of confusion, which suddenly from comedy had changed to the grimmest of grim earnest, we should go on beam-ends into the surf.
Seas such as I had never dreamed of were breaking on the bar before us. Overhead a storm was gathering. In the offing, it was reported, there sailed a strange and hostile ship. And in the brig Adventure there were contradictory orders and tangled ropes and men working at cross purposes.
Say what you will against Matterson in most respects, in that emergency he was the man who saved us. Throwing the helmsman from the wheel so violently that he fell clean over the companion ladder and down to the spar-deck, he seized the wheel and cried in a voice as hard as steel, "Gleazen, be still! Be still, I say! Now, Captain North, with head yards aback and after yards braced for the starboard tack, we'll make it."
Captain North, with an able man at the wheel,—to pay the devil his due,—gave orders in swift succession and the brig came back on her course and rose to meet the breakers. How Matterson so surely and confidently found the exact channel, I do not know. But this I do know: he took the brig in through the breakers without the error of as much as a hair's breadth, straight in along the channel, with never a mark to guide him that I could see, except the belt of tidal chop and the eddies of the intermingling currents, to the comparative quiet of the mouth of a river that led away before us into the mazes of vast swamps and tangled waterways, where mangroves and huge interweaving, overhanging vines and sickly sweet flowers grew in all the riotous luxury of tropical vegetation.