“Aye,” breathed the Skipper. He made out the shadow, not altogether with his eyes—the deeper senses do the work on such nights—and let her pay off. “But we can’t run this way long—we’d be smothered in the shoal water.” Again he tacked, again in a shadow of sails. “She’s in the same fix,” he muttered, and tacked again. No shadow pressed and he drew breath, but hardly a whole breath, when again voices, from aloft as well as from across the water. All about him he looked to make out. When he did make out anything there were two of them—one to each side. There was nothing to do, then, but try to outrun them both. He eased off his sheets and away went the old Pantheon.
“Running to perdition if I hold this long.” He could hear the roar quite plainly now, and, hearing it, groaned. “But I’ve got to keep clear. God! why don’t they hold up?”
And then it came—from straight ahead and so suddenly that no human power could avert, no quickness of hand or eye or trick of seamanship or weatherliness of vessel could avail. Head on to the old Pantheon it was—a phantom of white above and a band of black below showed through the driving snow. One awful wait that was worse than the actual collision, and then it came. The Pantheon cut into the other’s topside planking, her bowsprit bore through the other’s rigging and foresail—cr-s-sh!—cr-s-sh!—the smash of breaking timbers, the tearing of stiff canvas, and above all the howl of the wild gale.
Men hailed out questions, oaths, and words that no man could understand. They held so, the bow of one into the waist of the other, long enough for men from the Pantheon to leap aboard the other and then to leap back. “Man, she’s worse than we are!” shouted one, as back he came. The sea poured in by way of the great gashes. A moment more and it poured unchecked over the Pantheon’s rails. Then the spars of the stranger went over the side and across the Pantheon’s deck. Somebody moaned that he was hurt, but there was no time to find out who. The stranger’s dory bobbing up alongside, one man made a wild leap for it, fell short, and that ended him, though that mattered not much—he had no chance either way. Others—wraith-like voices—were heard calling from the sea before they went under smothering. One man called to a mate, “Take hold, boy,” and both rode grimly to their death, cresting high the great seas, astraddle the Pantheon’s chain-box.
Dannie clung to the wheel, hoping that the wind and sea would carry the Pantheon clear, and that, being ready, he might force her off. But not so. They did come apart, but apart they settled even more rapidly. The stranger went down stern first; the Pantheon stern hove high, pointed her bow after the stranger, and began to settle that way, bow first.
The Skipper was alone at the wheel when she made her plunge, and defiantly clung to her till he was carried far under. He rose to the surface and caught his breath. And that breath he gave to the Pantheon as he saw her mast-heads plunging. “You were a good vessel to me,” he murmured, even as the sea tossed him far away. He reached for something in the swash and found he had the wheel-box. He grasped it, but it was all smooth-sided—no place for his hands to get a grip, and the terrible tide rips tore him loose. One sea, and another, now high where the heavens touched the crests almost, and again in the depths and roarings he was cast like the flying spume itself.
Enveloped in foam so thick that even when his head was above the surface he could not breathe fairly, he still tried to justify that last catastrophe. “And yet you were a good vessel to me.”
There is always a last sea, and that last sea caught him fair and overbore him. He knew it when it came. The physical agony was by then and the soul surmounting all. Not till then did he indulge himself so far as to let his heart dwell on the memory of her as he last saw her, standing in the doorway when he turned the corner. For the last time he had turned that corner. Ah, but she was beautiful—and was it to lose her he came to sea?
The roar of Georges Shoals was in his soul. He began to hear the voices then, voices of his own men—he knew them—and voices he had never heard before—voices, no doubt, of men lost in these long years of toil in waters where the sands below are white with lost men’s bones. Her voice he heard, too—heard it above all. “Dannie, Dannie,” it whispered, plain as could be. By that he knew that she needed no newspaper to tell her—even at that moment she knew—knew, and was suffering. And all her life she would have to suffer. And so it was “God help you, Katie Morrison!” that parted his foam-drenched lips at the last.
The Katie Morrison was launched and rigged, but ’twas another young and hopeful skipper that sailed her out to sea.