“What was that?” It was hard to tell whether it was one voice or four that uttered the words. The boys sprang to their feet, and stood for a brief moment listening.
CHAPTER VIII
AN ICY STORM OFF “SUNNY” BATON ROUGE
On the alert but motionless, the four boys waited for a repetition of the strange noise, wondering what it meant. The wind still shrieked; all the pandemonium of sound continued, but the queer sound was not repeated, neither was the unusual jar.
Kenneth was the first to move. He jumped to the companionway, and pushed at the hinged doors leading on deck, but they did not move. Glued with the frost, they refused to open. He put his shoulder against them, and pushed with all his might. The expected happened—the doors opened suddenly, and Kenneth found himself sprawling on the floor of the cockpit. He skinned his shin on the brass-bound step of the companionway ladder, and his funny bone tingled from a blow it got on the deck. The boy tried to rise to his feet, but a sudden swing of the boat made him slip on the icy boards and fall swiftly down again. From his prone position, he looked around him. The light coming up through the open companionway gleamed yellow on the ice-coated, glistening boom, and the furled sail propped up in the crotch. As Ransom’s eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw what it was that had startled them all. “His Nibs,” hauled up on the narrow strip of deck aft of the rudder post, had slipped when the “Gazelle” had made a sudden plunge, and sliding on the icy rail had thumped into the cockpit. Perfectly safe, but ludicrously out of place, the little boat looked like a big St. Bernard in a lady’s lap.
“Look!” the prostrate captain called to his friends. “‘His Nibs’ was getting lonesome and was coming down into the cabin for the sake of sociability.”
The other three crawled on deck, having learned caution through the skipper’s mishap, and crouched in the wet, slippery cockpit while they looked around.
The gale, still increasing rather than abating, was raising tremendous seas. The “Gazelle” rolled, her rails under at times, and her bowsprit jabbed the white-capped waves.
“I am going forward to see if the anchors are O. K.” Kenneth spoke loudly enough, but the wind snatched the words from his mouth and the boys did not hear what he said.
Ransom managed to get on his feet, and, grasping the beading of the cabin, he pulled himself erect. A quick lurch almost threw him overboard, but he reached up and grabbed the boom overhead just in time. Holding on to this with both arms, he slowly worked himself forward.