"I said, 'Good reason.' There's a lot of heft in this wind."
"I sent the lookout up to the top of the center-house," Medbury now called. "No place for him forward."
"That's right," answered Captain March; then he nodded his head to show that he had heard and approved.
The watch was changed at twelve, and the second mate came on deck, but Medbury still lingered. Captain March would not leave the wheel. At three bells Medbury sounded the pumps again, and reported a full three and a half feet of water in the hold. It had gained two inches in three hours.
Captain March merely nodded when he was told, and turned his inscrutable face aloft.
XII
The night was dragging on toward the hour when the watch on deck is the hardest to bear. In his weariness of body and mind, Medbury had grown indifferent to the tremendous rush of the wind. The noises of the night no longer seemed near him, but far off, muffled by some strange mental wind-break that hedged him in as if by a wall. Once or twice he caught himself nodding, and looked up, startled, to take a turn or two across the deck. His mind was tense with the mental strain, and the changing of the men at the pumps, or any pause in the monotony of the uproar, irritated him, as the stopping of a railroad train at stations affects one dozing through a long journey. He was not afraid,—he had even begun to exult in the self-control of his superior, seeing in his perfect handling of his vessel something uncanny, even godlike,—yet he was all the while keenly alive to the thought that Hetty lay below, within the circle of impending danger. It was like being compelled to run for one's life under a great weight.
It was past four bells when the maintopsail split with a sharp report like musketry-fire, and, looking up, they saw black space where just before they had seen a gray hollow of canvas loom through the night. A ragged fringe of gray flapped along the bolt-ropes, whipping straight out in the force of the gale. They let tack and sheet go with a rush, and strove to clew up the topsail, trying to save, in the stoical following of habit, what was no longer worth saving.