Within ten minutes Captain Dixey was sending off telegrams like an Associated Press-man. He got the answer he wanted, and some hours later, when the man in the fur coat was putting out in another iron sea-going tug, the Durlich, Dixey, in the Ice King, was not half a mile behind him going across the Bay.
II
At about the same hour that the Durlich and the Ice King had breasted Cape Cod Light, the American fisherman Buccaneer, Crump Taylor master, lay hove-to on the Western Banks. On her deck were the two men on watch, alternately looking out for the big seas, and hailing one to the other when a particularly high one threatened to break over her rail.
Young Arthur Gillis, standing forward, suddenly called out to Sam Leary, his watchmate, who was aft, “Here’s one coming aboard, Sam, I think.”
Sam turned, brushed the spray from his eyes with a wet woollen mitt, and had a look. He did not have to look twice. “Think she’s coming! Think!” and leaped for the lee of the mainmast, where he hooked his fingers to a couple of belaying-pins in the fife-rail. Another squint then from around the mast. “Think!” and with a toe to the fife-rail and both hands to the halyards of the furled-up mainsail, he began to climb. “And climb you, too!” Another glance between the mast and bolt-rope of the sail. “Think, do you? Climb’s all I got to say. Climb, you alabaster idjit, and don’t stop till you’re to the masthead! She’s a Himalaya mountain.”
Sam was by then strategically astraddle the main gaff, from where in comfort he could observe Gillis, who was to the lantern-board in the fore-rigging and still climbing. The sea struck her, and over rolled the little Buccaneer, over, over, till her masts were all but flat out on the water. Her waist must have been buried under ten feet of water, but Sam from his perch could manage to keep his head clear of the sea.
He saw that his watch-mate was safe. “Hi, there! are the companion-way hatches down?”
“I think so.”
“You think so! Some day you’ll think you’re alive, and you’ll wake up dead. Is she lifting any for’ard? Can you tell from where you are? Will she come up?”
“I think——”