But fortune attends the brave. She was there in the morning, rolling worse than ever and lower in the water, but still afloat.
“Now, ain’t that amazin’?” demanded Crump of one after another of his crew. “Ain’t it amazin’?” he demanded of the captain of the bark.
That intriguing party could only shake his head at the miracle of it. “Still afloat! And when I left her I give her about an hour. I set her afire myself with my own hand,” he explained, “so nobody’d be misled into tryin’ to save her. ‘No salvage on her,’ I said. ‘Another hour and she’ll be burned to the water’s edge, and then she’ll sink and trouble nobody no more,’ I said. And a good job I thought it was, she was that dangerous-lookin’. And if I’d never set a match to her, she was leakin’ that bad, and that low in the water! And there she is still afloat! Well, that’s past me.”
That afternoon, the weather moderating, Crump sailed close up and once more offered to try to take off the worn-out gang of the now wildly sailing bark and put his own fresher men aboard.
“What!” exclaimed Sam—“leave her, and after we got her this far? Why we’re gettin’ to love the old hulk. Let’s finish the job, Skipper, so long’s we started it. Another day and we’ll be home.”
“Sam Leary, am I skipper, or you?”
“Why, of course you’re skipper, and if you order it—order it, Skipper—we got to obey.”
“Well, come aboard here.”
“How?”
“Rig up that taykle—the same that hoisted your gang aboard.”