All that night the prize crew labored. The sails needed but small attention. Hauling in or paying out occasionally sufficed for them, she being on the one tack all night; but the hull of the bark setting so low made the trouble. The seas broke almost continuously over her, and added to that were the icy decks, with footing so uncertain that at any moment a man was likely to be picked up and hurled into the roaring black void. When two or three men had been hove into the lee scuppers, and from there miraculously rescued, Sam saw to it that thereafter every man worked with a life-line about him.
Sam himself was fettered by no lashings. His work called for too extensive an activity. He had to be not only aft, but forward, and aloft as well as below. They could hear him moving in the blackness, grabbing sheets or halyards, fife-rail or rigging, as he stumbled from one place to another. Regularly did he disperse words of cheer. “We’ll get home yet, fellows, and fool ’em all—and then! For you home-bound craft, you that got families, there’s the wife who’ll have new dresses and the children copper-toed boots, and a carriage for the baby, with springs in it. Man, but the time you’ll all have! And the time we’ll have, we privateers—hah, Gillis?”
“M-m!” murmured Gillis from the region of the port pump-brake, and forced new energy into arms that long ago he had thought were beyond revival.
Morning came, and with it an increase of wind and cold. Crump, from the end of the Buccaneer’s bowsprit, where he managed to hang by the aid of the jib-stay, hailed Sam and offered to put on fresh men.
“No,” said Sam, “we’ll stick it out a while longer.”
“But by’n’by it’ll be too rough, Sammie, and we won’t be able to take you off.”
“Oh, well then, no harm—we’ll stick it out some way.”
“All right, have your way,” and Crump went back to the deck of his vessel.
That afternoon it began to look bad for the bark and the men aboard her. It was her captain, refreshed from a twenty-four hours’ sleep below, who thoughtlessly passed his opinion when he, the first of his crew to revive, poked his head above the companion-way and was astonished by the sight of the ship that he thought he had scuttled. “What—she on top of the water yet!” From the bark his eyes roved to the derailed ice-covered deck of the little Buccaneer, then up to Sam and his toiling gang again. “Well, they are damn fools, ain’t they, to think they’ll ever get her home?”
He said that to Crump, who answered softly: “Now, Captain, I don’t want to jar your feelings any, but if you don’t do one of two things—go below and stay there, or draw the hatch over your face if you stay up here—then I’m afeared I’ll have to pick you up and tuck you away under the run or somewhere else where you can’t be heard for a while. Damn fools, eh?” snorted Crump, and in sheer derision of some people’s judgment spat several fathoms to leeward.