At the risk of their lives, the two helmsmen held her as the schooner slid down the big slope of the wave, shivering as she went. As she rose, the captain, with a laughing heart, saw that she would make it. He tore off his "sou'-wester," and waved it frantically to Tab forward. Jerry threw up his arm in reply; the big "sea-anchor" rose from the deck, and went out on the port side.
"Helm amidships!" sang out Jack.
"Aye, aye, sir."
The Merle began to drift back.
"Watch along!" the captain roared again. "Gaskets on the mainsail!"
The starboard watch began to wrestle with the heavy canvas which they had partially freed from its bonds so short a time before. The sail was made snug, and the Merle dragged back on her "anchor," and though she plunged and tugged, pitched and rolled, still kept her sharp nose to the wind. Through the mist of the stinging brine which the wind drove down the decks in sheets, the captain saw the hands forward pay out some forty fathoms of scope, and then, man by man, work their way aft.
"I'm awfully sorry I—I made such a mess," Tab shouted in the captain's ear as he reached him.
"It's all right," returned Jack, aglow with a wild exultation. "It's all right! No matter."
The ominous belt of opaque mist which they had so shortly before seen on the horizon was now all about them. The Merle and her crew were enveloped in a shroud of rushing rain. It drove before the blast in incredible torrents, and with a force that made them catch their breaths chokingly whenever they faced it. The seas increased to frightful size. Even to the sailors, bred on the sea, it seemed hardly possible that the schooner could live in such surges. The cockpit, although self-bailing, was kept flooded; in it the water, sloshing about with the motion of the schooner, was as high as the transoms. The uproar of the wind, singing on the ropes strung by its own force to tautness, was like the shrieking of an immense and untuned harp. The crash of the waves sounded like a continuous cannonade all about the yacht. The mingling of sea and air produced a vertigo, as if everything was resolving again into its original chaos. Yet in the midst of it all Jack felt his blood sing in his veins with pure joy of the battle.