“We picked up our tow and started out. Within fifteen minutes I comprehended, though not a word was said, that we had tried an impossibility. The Shearwater was too old; she wasn’t up to towing a six-thousand tonner against sea and gale. Her wooden topsides were rotten. We could barely steer her. Then word came to the bridge that the hawser was pulling the after deck to bits. Harry Owen listened and then stared out over the sea, running with a brisk, ugly weight before the wind. He went aft and I joined him. The Shearwater was so built that the only place to take the line to was a small windlass directly in front of the steering gear, consequently the great straining hawser was slowly, but surely, tearing out the entire structure that held the leaping rudderhead and the quadrants.
“‘You’ve got to let her go, sir,’ said the mate, showing an anxious face. I shall never forget the queer pallor of his countenance under the dim light of the lantern on the deckhouse wall.
“Owen looked at him fixedly a moment. Then he said, just as I am speaking now, ‘Take the hawser around the after deckhouse, mister.’
“The mate gaped at him. But Owen’s eyes never wavered. The order was obeyed, though it took an hour, during which sea after sea came aboard the old Shearwater and the Western Pacific began frantic speech by wireless. However, the job was done.
“From now on the Shearwater was, you understand, almost helpless. It was cruel work and, at last, Harry himself took the wheel. Ten-inch lines, no matter how good they are, can’t stand up under such a strain as was inevitably put on ours. But Owen deliberately sacrificed his own vessel to save the Western Pacific.”
“I heard he went mad,” I murmured. Gorham lighted another pipe.
“Get this into your head: the big liner was on a lee shore, no help in sight; she would have gone on the rock in an hour had it not been for the Shearwater. But twenty miles south she would have been safe. Tugs were coming to her assistance. It was that twenty miles Owen was trying to make.”
“He was mad to try it,” I said. “No seaman with freight and passengers is justified in wrecking his own ship that way. And you tell me——”
“The chief officer and the engineer came to me about it,” Gorham went on. “That was their idea—that Harry Owen was mad. The Shearwater was being picked apart by the seas, as a boy pulls a toy to bits. In fact, when they finally appealed to me—after a deadly scene on the bridge—it looked very much as though we would be lucky to get to port ourselves without assistance. I recall that as we talked, down in the engineer’s cabin in full sight of the trampling engines, our voices were mournfully muffled. I was Harry Owen’s oldest friend, they told me, while the combers boomed and crashed overhead. It was my business to bring him to his senses.”
“Did they really think he was mad?” I demanded.