That was too much for Mr. Duncan, and, watching his chance, he dove between the house and rail, to the weather rigging, where the skipper grabbed him and made him fast beside himself. The old man took a look down the slant of the deck and took a fresh hold of the rigging.
“Captain Blake, isn’t she down pretty low?”
“Maybe––maybe––Mr. Duncan, but she’ll go lower yet before the sail comes off her. This is the day Sam Hollis was going to make me take in sail.”
Less than a minute after that we made our rush for the line. Hollis tried to crowd us outside the stake-boat, which was rolling head to wind and sea, worse than a lightship in a surf gale––tried to crowd us out just as an awful squall swooped down. It was the Johnnie or the Withrow then. We took it full and they didn’t, and there is all there was to it. But for a minute it was either vessel’s race. At the critical time Sam Hollis didn’t have the nerve, and the skipper and Clancy did.
They looked at each other––the skipper and Clancy––and Clancy soaked her. Held to it cruelly––recklessly. It was too much to ask of a vessel. Down she went––buried. It was heaven or hell, as they say, for a while. I know I climbed on to her weather run, and it was from there I saw Withrow ducking her head to it––hove to, in fact, for the blast to pass.
The Johnnie weathered it. Able––able. Up she rose, a horse, and across the line we shot like a bullet, and so close to the judge’s boat that we could have jumped aboard.
We all but hit the Henry Clay Parker, Billie Simms’s vessel, on the other side of the line, and it was on her that old Peter of Crow’s Nest, leaping into the air and cracking his heels together, called out as we drove by:
“The Johnnie Duncan wins––the able Johnnie Duncan––sailin’ across the line on her side and her crew sittin’ out on the keel.”