Under Rocking Skies

by L. Frank Tooker

"Here!" he said savagely, and the sailor turned to his task again without a word.

The day dragged interminably. Hetty remained steadily in her room; through his watches on deck Medbury drove the men from one task to another with a feverish harshness wholly unusual, and which brought his watch to the forecastle at the end of the day in heated and profane weariness. Drew spent the time on deck with a book, sometimes read with slight comprehension, but more often closed over his finger, while he watched the gleaming whiteness of the sea, seeing now a school of flying-fish run like flashes of quicksilver through the long arcs of their flight, and now the dorsal fin of a shark, like an inverted ploughshare, cut the surface of the barren glebe. Even Captain March's imperturbability became less rocklike. Once he paused at Drew's side with a grumbling sound that was clearly a sigh.

"Well, it's 'Paddy's hurricane,' and no mistake," he said. "I never saw anything like it. Usually there's a little air stirring somewhere about. You'd think that something queer had got into things, wouldn't you?"

He had been standing balancing himself easily to the swing of the deck, but there came a vicious lunge, which stopped suddenly, as if arrested by a great hand, and he went staggering down the slope with swaying arms, like a collapsing sprinter. When he brought up against the rail, he talked on in a level voice that recognized no interruption:

"It's queer about a calm: there's noise enough in it if a sea's running, and it gets on your nerves; but when the wind blows again, you feel as if you'd just come out of an air-tight room, and the sound of the wind makes you want to shout. There's Mr. Medbury, now; he's been nagging the men all the afternoon as if he was afraid without the sound of his voice, like a boy whistling on a dark road. It's ridiculous in a grown man, but it's natural enough."

Drew flushed, but made no reply. He, too, had been thinking of Medbury, but his thoughts were not enviable. He had been false to a man who had trusted him, he told himself, and he had shown feeling that he had no moral right to show. It was in vain that he tried to convince himself that his right to Hetty was as great as Medbury's own; in his heart he felt that it was not. And what of the girl? he asked himself, in growing remorse. After his action of the morning, could he again meet her on the old footing of friendly fellowship? He could not go on, but how could he now draw back? In any way that he looked, he could see nothing but his moral cowardice.

In a mental restlessness that he could not allay, he rose to his feet and walked forward to the break in the deck. The sun, a copper-colored ball, was nearing the horizon, and Medbury and his men were gathering up the sail that they had been patching; one of the crew was sweeping up the deck. The querulous complaining of Medbury's voice floated aft, the human undertone in the jangling noises of disturbed nature.

For a moment Drew watched the scene before him, and then descending the steps and, hurrying across the plank that was blocked high above the water that swashed across the deck from scupper to scupper, he stopped at the galley door. The steward looked up gloomily, but, seeing Drew, showed his gleaming teeth in a perfunctory smile that had none of its usual geniality. Through the high slide in the partition between the galley and the forecastle Drew could hear the watch trooping in with angry mutterings against the mate.

The steward grinned, and jerked his head toward the forecastle.

"Yo' heah dat?" he said. "Dese heah cahms trouble-breedehs faw shuah. Ole mahn Satan done chase dat buckra mate's soul roun' de stump all eb'nin'. Two, t'ree bad mahns aboa'd dis hookeh, en two, t'ree cowahds. Dose cowahds been da worse—some dahk night. Dat buckra mate betteh watch out." He laughed.