Then followed: “Put the tops’ls to her––sharp now.”
The halyards could be heard whirring up toward the sky, while two bunches of us sagged and lifted on the deck below. Among us it was, “Now then––o-ho––sway away––good,” until topsails were flat as boards, and the schooner, hauled up, had heeled to her scuppers.
“Slap the stays’l to her and up with the balloon. Half the fleet’s driving to the no’the’ard. Lively.”
The Johnnie liked that rarely. With the seventy-five foot main-boom sheeted in to her rail, with the thirty-seven-foot spike bowsprit poking a lane in the sea when she dove and a path among the clouds when she lifted, with her midship rail all but flush with the sea and the night breeze to sing to her––of course she liked it, and she showed her liking. She’d tear herself apart now before she’d let anything in the fleet go by her. And red and green lights were racing to both quarters of her.
“Into the boat!” It was the skipper’s voice again, and fifteen men leaped over the rail at the word. Two dropped into the dory and thirteen jumped from the vessel’s rail onto thwarts or netting or into the bottom of the seine-boat––anywhere at all so that they get in quickly. As extra hand on deck I had to stand by and pay out the painter.
In the middle of it came the skipper sliding down from the mast-head. “Drop astern, boat and dory,” he called out, and himself leaped over the quarter and onto the pile of netting as into the Johnnie’s boiling wake they went. The thirty-eight-foot seine-boat was checked up a dozen fathoms astern, and the dory just astern of that. The two men in the dory had to fend off desperately as they slid by the seine-boat.
On the deck of the Johnnie were the cook, who had the wheel, and myself, who had to stand by the sheets. There would be stirring times soon, for even from the deck occasional flashes of light, marking small pods of mackerel, could be made out on the surface of the sea. Clancy, now at the mast-head alone, was noting these signs, we felt sure, and with them a whole lot of other things. To the mast-heads of other vessels out in the night were other skippers, or seine-masters, and all with skill and nerve and a great will to get fish.
The Johnnie was making perhaps ten knots good now, and with every jerk the painter of the seine-boat chafed and groaned in the taffrail chock. The skipper from the boat called for more line. “Slack away a bit, slack away. We’re not porpoises.”