“Ye’ll hev to shake her again, son,” he shouted. “Be damned careful, naow, an’ don’t let her lose way or git tripped up.”
Watching his chance, Donald eased the helm down and yelled, “Now!” The sail flapped and jerked at the restraining sheet and down-haul while Nickerson and the gang hove down the tack-cringle with tugs and oaths. The schooner was sidling along in a momentary lull in the squalls with way upon her, when Donald saw the shadow of a big sea before him. He flashed a look astern; saw it piling up with a crest of foam, roaring and seething, and he screamed, “Look out, ahead!” and clawed the helm up as it thundered over the taff-rail and engulfed him in tons of chilly brine.
The water tore at his lashing and he hung to the wheel with his arms thrust through the spokes. While under water he instinctively shouldered the wheel up a bit to prevent a gybe; there was a roaring as of Niagara in his ears; red lights danced before his eyes; his lungs filled to bursting, while his strained muscles pained fearfully. Then his eyes glimpsed the daylight, and he straightened up off the wheel-box with a dull pain in his left side, while the gallant little vessel lifted ahead and rolled the water off her decks over both rails.
“All right, nipper?” came a voice from for’ard.
“Aye, all right!” he gasped faintly, steadying the schooner in a violent yaw. Dazed and panting for breath, he stood hanging on to the spokes and steering by instinct. They had got the fores’l tack tied down and were tying the reef-points. In a few minutes the sail was reefed, the down-haul cast off, and the gaff hoisted up again. Then they trooped aft, clawing their way along the slushy decks.
“Yer face is all over blood!” cried the skipper staring at Donald. “Did that sea hurt ye?”
The boy wiped the blood away from a wound in his forehead where his head had struck the handholds of the wheel-spokes. “That’s nothing, sir,” he replied. “I, couldn’t help letting that sea come aboard ... it caught us as she was coming to in the trough.”
“Of course you couldn’t help it,” said the other. “You did blame’ fine! You must ha’ swung her off an’ steadied her while that comber had you under. From for’ard, there was nawthin’ to be seen aft here but th’ main-boom stickin’ aout! Waal, she’s all right naow. Under that rag of a fores’l she’ll run like a hound. Ain’t there th’ hell of a sea runnin’ though? A square-rigger ’ud be sloshin’ through this under a fore-lower-tops’l—” He stopped and pointed at the smother down to starboard. “Look!” he shouted. “There’s a poor devil of an outward-bounder! See him? Hove to!”
The Starbuck’s crew stared in the direction indicated and glimpsed in the lift of the sleet squalls a big grey-painted barque lying under a mizzen stays’l and a goose-winged lower maintops’l with the lee clew hauled out. “Poor devils ... beatin’ to the west’ard off th’ pitch o’ th’ Horn ... sooner be on this hooker, captain!” shouted Thompson, and his remarks seemed strange when one made comparisons between the big wall-sided barque with her spacious decks and human complement of twenty-five or thirty men, and the little 95-ton Helen Starbuck and her seven hands all told. But Thompson was learning that size did not mean seaworthiness or even comfort, and an able little schooner of Bank fisherman model was to be preferred to a huge steel box like the Kelvinhaugh for ocean ranging.
The pain in McKenzie’s side was beginning to make him wince when a kick of the wheel jarred his body, and the skipper noticed it. He came close to the lad and shouted in order to be heard above the noise of wind and sea, “Hurt anywhere?”