“But listen!” as Elsa started to speak. “That isn’t all. The flapping canvas, with part of the gaff, pounded around like the devil let loose for the ten seconds before we couldn’t loosen the halyards and lower away the wreckage, but in that time it had parted the mainstay in two like a woman snipping a thread.
“Mind that, Elsa, a steel mainstay an inch thick. I never heard of one parting in my life before. Things were happening so fast that I couldn’t keep track of them, and now, just at the crucial minute, the old May jibed, fell off from the wind, and went into the trough of the sea. A great wave came then, ripped her rudder off (I found this as soon as I tried to use the wheel) and swept the decks, taking one man.
“Meanwhile the mainmast, with one stay gone, was whipping from side to side like a great, loose stick. I put the wheel in the becket and in one jump released the mains’l throat-halyards, while another fellow released the peak. The sail came down on the run in the lazy jacks and the men jumped on it and began to crowd it into some kind of a furl.
“I jumped back to the wheel and tried to bring her up into the wind, but I might as well have tried 235 to steer an ocean liner with a sculling sweep. Not only was her rudder gone, but the tiller ropes were parted on each side. It was damaged beyond repair!
“Once I read in school the funny poem of an American named Holmes. It was called the ‘One Hoss Shay,’ and it told about an old chaise that, after a hundred years of service, suddenly went to pieces all at the same time and the same place. Even, in that time of danger, the memory of the ‘One Hoss Shay’ came to me, and I thought that the May Schofield was doing exactly the same thing, although only half as old.”
“And then what happened?” asked Elsa, who had sat breathless through Code’s narrative.
“There’s not much more to tell,” he said, with an involuntary shudder. “It was too much for the old girl with that load in her. She began to wallow and drive toward the Wolves that I had caught a glimpse of through the scud. She hadn’t got halfway there when the mainmast came down (bringing nearly everything with it) and hung over the starboard quarter, dragging the vessel down like a stoat hanging to a duck’s leg.
“After that it was easy to see she was doomed. We chopped away at the tangle of wreckage whenever we got a chance, but that wasn’t often, because, in her present position, the waves raked her 236 every second and we had to hang on for dear life.
“And then she began to go to pieces––which was the beginning of the end. All hands knew it was to be every man for himself. We had no life preservers, and our one big dory had been smashed when the wreckage came down.”
Code’s face was working with suppressed emotion, and Elsa reached out her hand and touched his.