“Find out what we've got under us,” snapped Captain Downs. The wedges had been driven. “Let this nigger carry the lead for'ard!”
It was a difficult task in the night, because the leadline had to be passed from the quarter-deck to the cathead outside the shrouds; the rails and deck were slippery. Plainly, Captain Downs was proposing to show Mayo “a thing or two.”
He let go the lead at command, and heard the man on the quarter-deck, catching the line when it swung into a perpendicular position, report twenty-five fathoms.
Again, answering the mate's bawled orders, Mayo carried the lead forward and dropped it, after a period of waiting, during which the schooner had been eased off. He was soaked to the skin, and was miserable in both body and mind. He had betrayed himself, he had made an enemy of the man who knew something which could help him; he felt a queer sense of shame and despair when he remembered the girl and the expression of her face. He tried to convince himself that he did not care what her opinion of him was. What happened to that love she had professed on board the Olenia? What manner of maiden was this? He did not understand!
Five times he made his precarious trip with the lead, fumbling his way outside the rigging.
In twenty fathoms Captain Downs decided to anchor, after the mate, “arming” the lead by filling its cup with grease, found that they were over good holding ground.
When the Alden came into the wind and slowed down, slapping wet sails, the second mate hammered out the holding-pin of the gigantic port anchor, and the hawse-hole belched fathom after fathom of chain.
All hands were on deck letting sails go on the run into the lazy-jacks, and the big schooner swung broadside to the trough of the sea. She made a mighty pendulum, rolling rails under, sawing the black skies with her towering masts.
There are many things which can happen aboard a schooner in that position when men are either slow or stupid. A big negro who was paying out the mizzen-peak halyards allowed his line to foul. Into the triangle of sail the wind volleyed, and the thirty-foot mizzen-boom, the roll of the ship helping, swung as far as its loosened sheets allowed. The “traveler,” an iron hoop encircling a long bar of iron fastened at both ends to the deck, struck sparks as a trolley pulley produces fire from a sleety wire.
With splintering of wood and clanging of metal, the iron bar was wrenched from its deck-fastenings and began to fly to and fro across the deck at the end of its tether, like a giant's slung-shot. It circled, it spun, it flung itself afar and returned in unexpected arcs.