"Yes, yes," interrupted Jerry hastily. "It's with the rest of her gear. I'll get it." And he went aft.
Although the wind had not as yet increased in violence, Jack, standing as he did almost at the peak of the vessel, felt the motion much more than he had farther aft. The great gray-green seas heaved hard about the plunging yacht, and every now and then she ran bowsprit under. She was a rather dry boat, fortunately, of the "hollow bow" model, and in the fifteen or twenty minutes that the men had been working on the anchor, she had not taken any waves aboard. The spindrift, it is true, flew across her by the bucketful, but the men, dressed in their oilers, blinked the cold water out of their eyes and went on with their work. Before Jerry returned, however, as the crew were bending the old staysail to the triangular frame, the captain, to his consternation, saw that the Merle was just working her way up the breast of a mighty hill of water with all likelihood of burying herself in the rising wall of a wave ahead.
"'Ware water!" he shouted.
The men dropped their work and caught at whatever was nearest at hand. Some threw an arm about the bollard by the knighthead; some jumped for the winch; two men got a tight grip on the large ring-bolts by the port cat-heads; Jack himself leaped for the winch and put his right arm around the drum.
The Merle labored to the crest of the hill of water. It sank away beneath her instantly, and she shot down the slope of the wave into the trough of the sea with a headlong, staggering rush. Towering above her was the roughened, foam-blotched face of the succeeding wave. She tried bravely to climb it, but she was too near, the angle was too sharp; she could not so quickly recover from the impetus of her downward plunge. She seemed to tremble—to hesitate—for an instant, and then as if in the courage of despair, to leap forward with a jerk into the very midst of the flood as if she would force her way through its tons of swinging sea-water.
Jack went to the deck under the tremendous blow of the on-rushing wave as if he had been struck down by a thunderbolt. He felt the shock, the biting cold of the water, and then it seemed as if a giant had gripped him with hands of ice and were trying to wrench him from his hold. He clung on, drenched, bewildered, desperate, until he wondered if his arm would be pulled out of its socket. He had a stifling sensation of having been for hours without air; he felt as if he were being dragged by some terrible power swiftly through the sea miles below the surface. On a sudden he again felt the deck under him, and opened his eyes. The Merle had forced her way through the wave, and they were again free. He gasped, spluttered, and rose to his feet, the water streaming from him. Inside the bulwarks to starboard the green, foam-mixed brine washed about knee-deep, and was pouring with a hoarse gurgling out of the scuppers forward. The "anchor" had been swept bodily aft as far as the foremast, and there was jammed between the mast itself and the weather-shrouds. Drenched and cursing, the men squelched their way aft, dislodged the structure, and dragged it forward again. Luckily the mishap, really a slight one of twenty seconds' duration, had wrought no damage which could not be easily repaired, and so the crew took up their work where they had left it.
Jerry reappeared with the killock of the market-boat just as they got into place once more.
"Did you get wet?" he asked cheerily, with a broad grin which showed that he saw what had happened.
"What do you think?" burst out the captain hotly. "No; I got dry, damn it!"
"Did you really, though! Well, I thought you looked damp."