CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
It was two in the morning, and McKenzie, keeping a watch by standing inside the cabin gang-way with his head and shoulders above the slide, noticed that the foresail was too much for the vessel in the hurricane squalls then blowing. To Wesley Sanders, standing on the cabin house hanging on to the main-boom, he bawled, “Go’n call the boys. We’ll have to reef that fores’l!”
Sanders clawed his way forward in the darkness and Donald waited for the men to muster aft. As they peered at the huge seas rushing to loo’ard and felt the terrific force of the wind, they realized that it was time to clip the Alameda’s wings, for if they didn’t reef the sail, either mast or sail would go and they would be in a nasty mess. Never, in his years at sea, had he ever seen such a gale, nor had old Archie or any of the others. It was an awe-inspiring sight—something to put fear in the heart of the boldest, and McKenzie admitted to himself that he was nervous, but not afraid. He was constrained to marvel at the Providence which kept them comparatively safe up to the present in this tremendous broil of wind-thrashed water—this war of elemental Titans in the midst of whom the schooner was tossed like a chip. As he waited for the men to report aft, he thought of some verses about the Gloucester fishermen in the big gale of 1879.
“Oh, the black, black night on Georges,
When eight-score men were lost!
Were you there, ye men of Gloucester?
Aye, ye were there, and tossed
Like chips upon the water
Were your little craft that night,