West Wind Drift

by George Barr McCutcheon

The occupants of the derelict had settled down to a dull, almost dogged state of resignation. There were several deaths and burials, incidents that made but little impression on the waiting, watchful survivors. Each succeeding day brought forth additional watchers to swell the anxious throng,—resolute and sometimes ungovernable men who, defying their wounds and the nurses, refused to stay where they could not have a hand in all that was going on.

Back of all this pitiful courage, however, lurked the unholy fear that they might be left to their fate in case the ship had to be hurriedly abandoned.

Mr. Mott watched the weather. Every seaman on board the Doraine scanned the cloudless sky with searching, anxious eyes. They sniffed the steady wind that blew them farther south. Always they scanned the sky and sniffed the wind.

“It's got to come sometime,” repeated Captain Trigger, after each report from Mr. Mott.

“I've known weather like this to last for weeks,” said the First Officer.

“In the South Pacific, yes,” said the Captain grimly. “But we're in the South Atlantic, Mott.”

On the sixth day the barometer began to fall. The breeze stiffened. The sea became choppy, and white-caps danced fitfully over the greenish stretches, growing wilder and wilder under the whip of a flouting wind. The two patchwork sails on the lumbering Doraine flapped noisily for awhile, as if shaking off their tor-por, then suddenly grew taut and fat with prosperity. The twisted, half-jammed rudder,—far from worthy despite the efforts of its repairers,—whiningly obeyed the man at the wheel, and once more the ship felt the caress of the deep on her cleaving bows.

The horizon to the north and west seemed to draw nearer, the contrast between the deepening blue of the water and the clear azure of the contracting dome more sharply defined. The sky that had been cloudless for days still remained barren, but the sailor knew what lay beyond the clear-cut rim of the world. The man of the sea could look far beyond the horizon. He could see the ugly clouds that were even now speeding down from the north, invisible as yet but soon to creep into view; he could see the mighty billows on the other side of that distant line; he could hear the roar and shriek of the tempest that was still hundreds of miles away. It was the matter of but a few hours before the wind and the billows would rush up to smite the Doraine with all their might under the cover of a black and storm-rent sky. And what was to become of the vessel, floundering in the path of the hurricane?

Late afternoon brought the forerunner of the gale, a whistling, howling squall that frantically strove, it would seem, to outrace the baleful clouds. Then the Doraine was in the thick of the furious revel of sea and sky, plunging, leaping, rolling like a monstrous cork....

How she managed to weather the storm, God knows, and He alone. At the mercy of wave and wind, she was tossed and hammered and racked for two frightful days and nights, and yet she remained afloat, battered, smashed, raked from stem to stern, stripped of everything the tempest could wrench from her in its fury. And yet on the third day, when the storm abated, the sturdy ship was still riding the waves, flayed but un-conquered, and the baffled sea was licking the sides of her once more with servile though deceitful tenderness.