"Case was a good boy," they said, "and would have been a fine officer by-and-by. Well, our turn next."
Every time the Pandora bowed a wave the hawse-holes still spurted; the foc'sle deck ran wet and glimmered darkly in the feeble light from the stinking lanterns swinging on both port and starboard sides. The air was saturated with moisture, rank sweat ran down the beams, dripping blankets swayed from the edges of unoccupied bunks; the men were damp, subdued, unhappy. Now, as the ship lay to, the wind no longer swept into the foc'sle under the flapping screen by the windlass, but still eddies of swift cold air shook it, and the men shivered under their oilskins, that they wore now for warmth.
"I wish I'd never seed her," said Jack Marchmont, and Joe did not answer his mate. Not ten words were spoken till the wheel and look-out were relieved at four o'clock. Both were idle jobs, for the night was still as dark as death, and the wheel with a grummet over its spokes looked after itself.
"Oh, it's all solid comfort, this is," said Jack. "I wonder whose wet clothes will be for sale next?"
They buried the second mate in the grey waste of sea before they put the Pandora before the moderating gale. The mate read the burial service, for Captain Rayner stayed below. The steward told the men in a whisper that he was ill.
"He's all broke up," he said, "I seed him cryin' like a child. And no wonder; this is a wicked ship. I wish I'd left her in Melbourne."
And some of the men frowned. They did not like to hear him call the Pandora wicked. For the ship was, in its way, alive; it was possessed. They wished to propitiate it; superstition had them by the throat.
But they were easier when the body was committed to the deep. And the mate assumed a more cheerful air when he had carried the Prayer Book into his berth and came on deck again. They put the ship before the wind and loosed the foresail. But though the wind had taken off, the sea was very heavy, and the Pandora wallowed riotously. She took in seas over both rails. Thrice that day she filled the main-deck, and but for the life-lines rigged right from the foc'sle to the poop many men would have been washed overboard. As she ran with the wind on the port quarter, she sometimes dived as if she would never come up. The galley fire was out, and could not be lighted; the men drank water and ate biscuit.
"Hogs, dogs, and sailors," they said. Every time the vessel dived they held their breath.
The mate had a hard time, for Rayner was incapable of work, and she carried no apprentices. Forward there was no one capable of an officer's work; there was no broken skipper whom drink had destroyed, no young fellow with a second mate's "ticket." So Mr. Gamgee practically slept on deck in snatches till he slept almost as he stood under the weather-cloth in the mizzen rigging. He prayed for moderate weather, for a sight of the sun. But though the gale was less, it still blew hard, and the sky was black and the racing scud low, and the sun was not seen by day or a star by night. On the third day Gamgee staggered as he walked.