CHAPTER XXX
IN WHICH IS SHIPWRECK OF OTHER SORT
AFTER the fashion of these gulf storms, this one tarried not in its coming, nor offered any clemency when it had arrived. Where but a half-hour since the heavens had been fair, the sea rippling, suave and kind, now the sky was not visible at all and the tumbling waves about us rolled savagely as in a nature wholly changed. The wind sang ominously overhead, as with lift and plunge we drove on into a bank of mist. A chill as of doom swiftly had replaced the balm of the southern sky; and forsooth, all the mercy of the world seemed lost and gone.
And as our craft, laboring, thrust forward blindly into this reek, with naught of comfort on any hand, nor even the dimmest ray of hope visible from any fixed thing on ahead, in like travail of going, in like groaning to the very soul, the bark of my life now lay in the welter, helpless, reft of storm and strife, blind, counseled by no fixed ray ahead. I know not what purpose remained in me, that, like the ship which bore us, I still, dumbly and without conscious purpose, forged onward to some point fixed by reason or desire before reason and desire had been engulfed by this final unkindness of the world. For myself, I cared little or none at all. The plunge of the boat, the shriek of the wind, the wild magic and mystery of it, would have comported not ill with a strong man’s tastes even in hours more happy, and now, especially, they jumped with the wild protest of a soul eager for some outlet of action or excitement. But for these others, these women—this woman—these boys, all brought into this danger by my own mad folly, ah! when the thought of these arose, a swift remorse caught me; and though for myself I feared not at all, for these I feared.
Needs must, therefore, use every cool skilled resource that lay at hand. No time now for broken hearts to ask attention, the ship must be sailed. Crippled or not, what she had of help for us must be got out of her, used, fostered, nourished. All the art of the navigator must be charged with this duty. We must win through. And, as many a man who has seen danger will testify, the great need brought to us all a great calm and a steady precision in that which needed doing.
I saw Peterson at the wheel, wet to the skin, as now and again a seventh wave, slow, portentous, deadly-deliberate, showed ahead of us, advanced, reared and pounded down on us with its tons of might. But he only shook the brine from his eyes and held her up, waiting for the slow pulse of our crippled engine to come on.
“Can’t keep my pipe lit!” he called to me, as I stood beside him; and at last, Peterson, in a real time of danger, seemed altogether happy and altogether free of apprehension beyond that regarding his pipe.
At the first breaking of the storm I had, of course, ordered all ports closed, and had sent both my young companions to the ladies’ cabin aft, as the driest part of the boat. Even there, the water that sometimes fell upon our decks as the great waves broke, poured aft and even broke about the cabin, drenching everything above deck. It was man’s work that was to be done now, yet none could bear a hand in it save the engineer and the steersman. I was, therefore, ready sternly to reprove Jean Lafitte when, presently, I saw him making the perilous passage forward, clinging to the rail and wet to the skin before he could reach the forward deck. But he protested so earnestly and seemed withal so fit and keen, that I relented and allowed him to take his place by us at the wheel, showing him as well as I could, on the chart, the course we were trying to hold—the mouth of a long channel, six miles or more, dredged by the government across a foot of the bay and making through to deeper and more sheltered waters beyond.