"Square away!" Jordan's voice rang out, and the long mainboom swung out again, while there was by contrast a curious ease of motion when the Champlain, rising more upright, turned her stern to the sea. It no longer thrashed in over her weather bow, but ran forward white-topped on either side of her, but the breeze was even stronger, and Appleby wondered, when the voice rose again.
"Run the gaff topsail back to the masthead, boys!"
It took several of them to do it, and more were needed before they hauled the sheet home. Then the Belle dropped away behind, though the other vessel stayed where she was, half-a-mile under their lee quarter, a pyramid of swaying sail.
Jordan laughed softly as he glanced towards her over his shoulder. "Old man Carter's most as stubborn as a mule," he said. "Well, we'll have more wind by and by, and I'm figuring we'll see things then. I don't know any reason you shouldn't get your dinner in the meanwhile, boys."
They trooped below, and there was no great change when they came up, except that the Belle was farther astern and the sea seemed to be getting steeper. They swept on before it all afternoon, and the men were a little more silent when, with a great rolling in of smoky vapours, nightfall came. It was now blowing tolerably hard, but while the seas frothed white as they surged past high above the rail, the Champlain still drove on under all her lower sails. She was swept by bitter spray, and the man who held her straight was panting at the wheel, but the vapours rolled down thicker and the Belle and the Argo were indistinguishable. Niven was lying in his bunk when Stickine came down, and his face was a trifle grave, while, as he flung off his dripping oilskins, there was a great thud and gurgle forward, and something seethed across the hatch.
"Put her nose in that time," he said. "Well, we've got to shake them off, but we're taking steep chances already, and we can't press her as we're doing very long."
"Could you make the others out?" asked a man, and Stickine laughed silently.
"No," he said. "Still, we will do if the moon comes through. I know old man Carter, and he'd run her under before he'd let us beat him. It wouldn't take them long to get the spare gaff on the Belle."
He flung himself into his bunk as he was, and Appleby, who had heard him, asked no questions. He began to realize that these big, good-humoured sealers could on occasion be very grim, though this was not a cause of much astonishment to him, for he had seen already that it is not, as a rule, the domineering and ostentatious who take the foremost place when the real stress comes. He slept, but it was lightly, for the roar of the sea about the bows and groaning of the hard-pressed hull roused him now and then. At times he seemed to feel the great beams and knees straining above him and the tremulous quiver of the vessel's skin, while when for the fourth time he wakened suddenly a shower of brine came down with a hoarse voice through the scuttle. The light of the swinging lamp showed that Niven was sitting up wide awake, and in a few more minutes they crawled out on deck with several of the men.
A shower of stinging spray beat into their eyes, and when he could see again, Niven had a disconcerting glimpse of a big frothing comber apparently curling above the schooner's stern. The decks ran water, but when he glanced aloft every sail but the topsail was drawing still, and he clutched the rail when as they swung upwards a blink of moonlight pierced the flying vapours. To leeward of them lay a schooner, her hull just showing faintly black through the white smother that seethed about her, until she hove a breadth of it up streaming in a leeward roll. It appeared insignificant in comparison with the mass of dusky sail that swayed low again towards the rushing froth as she lurched back to weather, and then Appleby glanced aft with a little thrill to the grim set face of the man who stood panting at the Champlain's wheel.