It took us the better part of an hour to get things sorted out and the boat properly trimmed. I took in two reefs to be on the safe side. The damage didn't appear great, but only daylight would reveal what had happened aloft. The strain as the full, weight of the mains'l had swung across had been terrific.
Masthead fittings might be torn out or loosened. When the ship was at last riding easily, I sent Jill below to fix Curtis's arm and put Jorgensen on the wheel. Dick and the two hands were stowing sails for'ard. I entered up the log and then checked our course on the compass. The binnacle light threw a faint glow on Jorgensen's face. 'Why did you hit Dahler?' I asked him. He didn't answer and I said, 'The man's a cripple. He should never have been allowed to take the wheel in this wind. He couldn't hold it.' Still Jorgensen said nothing. 'Do you think he did it on purpose?' I demanded.
'What do you think?' he asked.
I remember how Jorgensen had been standing on the hatch cover, reaching up for the jackyard. If I hadn't sensed the gybe coming and yelled a warning to him, the boom would have swept him overboard. It would have smashed his ribs and sent him hurtling over the life lines. If Dahler had wanted to get rid of Jorgensen… 'It was an accident,' I said angrily.
'An accident?' He laughed. 'Dahler has been sailing boats all his life. That was no accident, Mr Gansert. You heard what was said between us in the saloon just before we came on deck.'
'You were threatening to have him arrested,' I said. 'But that doesn't prove that he tried to — to involve you in an accident.'
To murder me I think you were going to say.' He shifted his grip on the wheel. 'Let us call things by their proper names,' he added. 'What Dahler did was attempted murder.' The way he said it, it sounded ugly.
'I'll go down and have a word with him,' I said, and left him sitting there at the wheel.
It seemed incredible that Dahler should have meant to kill him. And yet, sitting there at the wheel and seeing Jorgensen standing on that hatch, the means of killing was right there in his hands. He had only to turn the wheel and the gybe was bound to happen. An accident. Nobody would have been able to prove that it wasn't an accident. And there would have been no chance of picking Jorgensen up with the ship's tangle of sails and broken rigging. It was understandable if he were a novice. Only a little while before he took the wheel Curtis had almost done the same thing by accident. But if he'd been sailing boats all his life…
I pushed open the saloon door. Curtis was pulling on his jersey. Jill was in the galley sweeping up broken crockery. 'How's the shoulder?' I asked Curtis.