“Ox-eye!” Mr Chisholm repeated after him in a quizzing tone, with a grin on his face. “I’ve heard of ox-tongues before—those tinned ones ain’t bad eating sometimes for lunch on a pinch; but an ox-eye—what is that, Draper?”
“Nothin’ to larf about,” grunted out our crusty coxswain, bracing his body against the loom of the oar with which he was steering and slewing the boat’s head aside to avoid a cross sea that nearly broke at that very moment over our bows. “If ye’d be’n as long on this coast as me, sir, ye’d know when ye seed one o’ them things up there—it means, ‘Look out!’ Ay, by the Lord too, we must look out now! Stand by there—all hands lie down in the bottom of the boat; it’s yer only chance, if ye values yer lives!”
“Down, men!” Mr Chisholm cried, endorsing Draper’s words of warning with his command. “Do as the coxswain tells you—down for your lives!”
Our chaps who were seated on the thwarts forwards and amidships at once scrambled down on the bottom boards, while we in the sternsheets, including Mr Chisholm himself, squatted on the grating, only old Draper sitting up still at his post aft with both hands holding the loom of the steering oar in a firm grip.
“Bend yer heads,” muttered this worthy the next moment; “it’s a-comin’ now!”
As the words passed his lips and we all bowed down below the level of the gunwale, the roar of the sea seemed hushed in the dead stillness that ensued; and then, with a wild shriek that sounded like the moaning of some lost soul from the bottomless pit, the wind, which had been gathering up all its strength in the interim, burst upon us, burying the cutter’s bows as it struck her right under water.
Bouncer, frightened out of his life, made a movement to rise as he lay alongside me on the stern grating; but old Draper gave him a kick in the ribs with the toe of his heavy boot.
“Lie still, you beggar!” he cried, bringing, with a tremendous pull of his arms, the oar-rudder hard over. “The boat’s rightin’ all right. We’ve seed the wust on it if yer’ll only bide still!”
Fortunately, we had a weather cloth over the bow, which prevented the sea from pouring in and swamping us when the cutter dipped under; while, as all of us remained quiet and our dead weight was more towards the stern than forwards, the boat’s natural buoyancy prevailed and she rose up like a cork.
The worst might have been over, as Draper had said; still, we were not ‘out of the wood’ yet, gust after gust assailing us, and the waves racing up madly astern, when, dividing, they would tower up on either side of our frail craft, threatening destruction for the moment ere they rolled onward again—we, all the while, fleeing before the fury of the storm we knew not whither, powerless alike to shape a course or guide our boat.