"I suppose it's a good thing to have all the freeboard at the bow you can, also," he said.
"That's the idea," was Ben's reply.
And now the storm was upon them in its full fury.
The wind seemed like a wild beast filled with furious instincts and bent on the destruction of the Bolo. Half buried in the giant waves that the sudden hurricane whipped up, the little craft bravely struggled along. Bluewater Bill kept her nose pointed right into the big combers.
Her engine was cut down to half and then a quarter speed, but she was rolling so badly that Ben Stubbs was considering the advisability of putting a rag of sail on her to steady her. She wallowed in the big seas like an empty bottle, and every lurch threatened to start some of her seams.
While not exactly scared, the boys were certainly worried.
"Do you think she'll last out?" asked Billy of Ben, poking his head out of the cabin companion—for all the boys but Frank had been ordered below by Ben that there might be plenty of room for working the Bolo in case of a sudden emergency.
"Last out?" roared Ben, the wind whipping the words from his lips as fast as he framed them, "why of course she will, my boy. I've seen as bad seas as this lived out by a craft no bigger than our dory."
But although Ben spoke so confidently he was, none the less, worried. As long as the engine kept at its work he knew they were all right, but, like most old "tar hands," he mistrusted gasolene "contraptions," as he called them, and in this instance his mistrust seemed well founded, for, as he stood in the after part of the cockpit looking anxiously astern at the mountainous green combers that raced after the Bolo, as if determined to drag her down to "Davy Jones' locker," the old sailor noticed something peculiar about the motion of the boat.
She seemed to be falling off into the trough of the waves.