A dull, hoarse whisper, faint and continuous, was now audible ahead. It grew louder by very slow degrees, and Jerry, unused as he was to Mediterranean weather, knew it for the roar of a mighty wind. In the moonlight ahead the waters appeared troubled, the hard-heaving seas being strangely and almost weirdly demarked from the calm in which the Merle rolled forward languidly. All at once, as the yacht emerged from the obscurity of the mountain's shadow, a sudden gust of warm air struck her without warning, and heeled her lee-rail under.
"Hard down!" roared Jack.
Jerry leaped to the wheel, and it took all the force of himself and the helmsman to put the helm hard-a-lee. The Merle righted, and being unusually quick, flew into the eye of the wind. From the threshing sails came a thunderous volley of heavy boomings. The sheet-blocks were whipped to and fro with such violence that twice Jack saw red sparks struck from the fore-traveler guard. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the wind left, and it was only by the way she had gathered that the helmsman could pay the yacht off.
"We are going to catch it for fair," Jack said. "Best dowse the foresail entirely, I fancy. Pass the word along to Gonzague to make all snug below. Jerry, step into the cabin and make sure of the course from off Ceuta to Port Mahon."
"Right-o," answered Jerry briskly, diving down.
"Get down the fores'l!" shouted the captain to the men.
"Helm up a bit there—steady! That's the talk! Get all the stops on.—Now then—make fast that sheet there."
The Merle was hardly on her course again when a second squall struck her. Her canvas having been reduced, however, the helmsman kept her broadside to it. The yacht's strongest point was the quickness with which she gathered way, and on this occasion, when nine tenths of her class would simply have lain over and quivered, she rushed ahead with the fury of an avenging goddess. When the hot flaw left her, she was at the very last verge of the calm water.
"Stand by the main-sheet to square off when she meets it!" shouted Jack.
The men had hardly time to get to their stations before a third squall caught the Merle and sent her tearing over the line into the full strength of the wind. The air, hot from the desert, and laden with fine, parching dust, sang in the shrouds and the running-rigging. It slashed the salt spindrift in the smarting faces of the men. The seas grew suddenly confounding in size; huge weltering masses—tons—of greenly black water wallowed without rhythm all about the yacht, up as high as the light-boards. To a landsman it would have seemed impossible that thus scourged by the sirocco across these maddened seas the schooner should escape destruction.