Hawtrey's Deputy

by Harold Bindloss

"Ice!" he roared. "Big pack of it right under your weather bow."

Dampier shouted something, but Wyllard did not hear what he said. He was only conscious that he had to decide what he must do in the next few seconds. If he let the Selache come up to avoid the boat, there was the ice ahead, and at the speed she was travelling it would infallibly crush her bows in, while if he held her straight there was the boat close in front of her. To swing her clear of both by going to leeward he must bring the mainsail and boom-foresail over with a tremendous shock, but that seemed preferable, and with his heart in his mouth he pulled his helm up.

He fancied he cried out in warning, but was never sure of it, though three men came running to seize the mainsheet. The schooner fell off a little, swinging until the boom-foresail came over with a thunderous bang and crash. She rolled down, heaving a wide strip of wet planking out of the sea, and now for a moment or two there were great breadths of canvas swung out on either hand. Then the ponderous mainboom went up high above his head, and he saw three shadowy figures dragged aft as they tried in vain to steady it. The big mainsail was bunched up, a vast, portentous shape above him, and then he set his lips, and pulled up the helm another spoke as it swung. He never quite knew what happened after that. There was a horrible crash, and the schooner appeared to be rolling over bodily. The spokes he clung to desperately reft themselves from his grasp, the deck slanted until one could not stand upon it, and something heavy struck him on the head. He dropped, and Dampier flung himself upon the wheel above his senseless body.

Then there was mad confusion, and a frantic banging of canvas as the schooner came up beam to the wind, with her rent mainsail flogging itself to tatters. Its ponderous boom was broken, and the mainmast-head had gone, but it was not the first time the sealermen had grappled with somewhat similar difficulties, and Dampier kept his head. He had the boat to think of, and she was somewhere to windward, hidden in the sudden darkness and the turmoil of the quickly rising sea, but in the meanwhile the schooner counted most of all. His crew could scarcely hear him through the uproar the thundering canvas made, and the screaming of the wind, but the orders were given, and from habit and the custom of their calling they knew what they must be.

They hauled a jib down, backed the fore-staysail, and got the boom-foresail sheeted in, but they let the rent mainsail bang, for it could do no more damage than it had already done. Then a man sprang up on the rail with a blue light in his hand, and as the weird radiance flared in a long streak to leeward a cry rose from the water. In another few moments a blurred object, half hidden in flying spray, drove down upon the schooner furiously on the top of a sea, and then there was sudden darkness as the man flung down the flare.

Another harsh and half-heard cry rose out of the obscurity. An indistinguishable object plunged past the schooner's stern, there was a crash to leeward as she rolled, and a man standing up in the boat clutched her rail. He was swung out of it as she rolled back again, but he crawled on to the rail with a rope in one hand, and after jamming it fast round something sprang down with the hooks of the lifting tackles which one of the rest had given him. Then, while two more men scrambled up, there was a clatter of blocks, but a shattered sea struck the boat as they hove her dear, and when she swung in the brine poured out through the rents in her. Dampier waved an arm as they dropped her on the deck, and they heard him faintly.

"Boys," he said, "you have got to cut that mainsail down."

They did it somehow, hanging on to the mast-hoops, buffeted and now and then enveloped by the madly flogging canvas, floundering below amidst a raffle of fallen gear, while the bitter spray lashed them, and the broken boom held up by the clew ring banged savagely to and fro. After that they trimmed her fore-staysail over, and there was by contrast a curious quietness as Dampier jammed his helm up, and the schooner swung off before the sea. Then somebody lighted a lantern, and Charly stooped over Wyllard, who lay limp and still beside the wheel. His face showed grey in the feeble light, save where a broad red stain had spread across it. Dampier cast a glance at him.

"Get him below, and into his bunk, two of you," he said.

They did it with difficulty, for the Selache lurched viciously each time a white-topped sea came up upon her quarter, and as soon as it seemed advisable to leave the deck Dampier went down. Wyllard lay in his bunk, with his eyes half-open, but there was no expression in them, and his face was almost colourless except for the broad smear of blood. It was oozing fast from a laceration in his scalp, but Dampier, who noticed his chilliness, did not in the meanwhile trouble about that. He stripped off the senseless man's long boots, and unshipping a hot fender iron from the stove laid it against his feet. Afterwards he contrived to get some whisky down his throat, and then set to work to wash the scalp wound, dropping into the water a little of the permanganate of potash, which is freely used at sea. When that was done he applied a rag dipped in the same fluid, and seeing no result of his efforts went back on deck. He was anxious about his patient, but not unduly so, for he had discovered long ago that men of his description are apt to recover from more serious injuries. By and bye, he said, Wyllard's brain, which had evidently been rudely jarred by the shock, would resume its functions.