“Do you hear that, Jack? Come, you behave!” roared David.
A faint snarl from Talboys. The water had penetrated him, and roused him from a state of sick torpor; he lay in a tidy little pool some eight inches deep.
The boat was bailed and lightened, but Lucy's fears were not set at rest. What was to hinder the recurrence of the same danger, and with more fatal effect? She timidly asked David's permission to let her keep the sea out. Instead of snubbing her as she expected, David consented with a sort of paternal benevolence tinged with incredulity. She then developed her plan; it was, that David, Jack, and she should sit in a triangle, and hold the tarpaulin out to windward and fence the ocean out. Jack, being summoned aft to council, burst into a hoarse laugh; but David checked him.
“There is more in it than you see, Jack—more than she sees, perhaps. My only doubt is whether it is possible; but you can try.”
Lucy and Jack then tried to get the tarpaulin out to windward; instead of which, it carried them to leeward by the force of the wind. The mast brought them up, or Heaven knows where their new invention would have taken them. With infinite difficulty they got it down and kneeled upon it, and even then it struggled. But Lucy would not be defeated; she made Jack gather it up in the middle, and roll it first to the right, then to the left, till it became a solid roll with two narrow open edges. They then carried it abaft, and lowered it vertically over the stern-port; then suddenly turned it round, and sat down. “Crack!” the wind opened it, and wrapped it round the boat and the trio.
“Hallo!” cried David, “it is foul of the rudder;” and, he whipped out his knife and made a slit in the stuff. It now clung like a blister.
“There, Mr. Dodd, will not that keep the sea out?” asked Lucy, triumphantly.
“At any rate, it may help to keep us ahead of the sea. Why, Jack, I seem to feel it lift her; it is as good as a mizzen.”
“But, oh, Mr. Dodd, there is another danger. We may broach to.”
“How can she broach to when I am at the helm? Here is the arm that won't let her broach to.”