The vessel was plunging very much after the manner of a fiery war horse upon feeling the cruel barb of the spurs.
It took me several minutes to collect my scattered senses; I had gone to sleep under dreamy, starry skies, with the soft, sensuous breath of the tropic sea around me, and now to awaken with the shrill, piercing gale shrieking through the rigging, and the yacht plunging headlong into watery valleys that threatened her with destruction, was a change indeed quite sufficient to stagger one.
I crawled out.
It required considerable agility to dress under such unsteady conditions, and I received more than one bruise from contact with the sides of my narrow quarters.
During my ownership of the yacht I had cruised in her tens of thousands of miles in every sea known upon the face of the globe—I had been caught in quite a good many violent gales, and even experienced a fierce typhoon in the treacherous China Sea.
Really, I could not remember any storm that had sprung upon us with greater suddenness and fiercer opening than this. Why had not the barometer given warning? Perhaps it had to some extent, but our departure from the harbor of Bolivar had been so hasty that even the prospect of a hurricane could not have held us.
And for the first time I felt fear.
Why was this? Experience is supposed to make men hardened; familiarity breeds contempt; and yet I actually trembled when the sturdy little vessel made an extraordinarily fierce plunge downward, filled with the dread that she would be overwhelmed and never rise again.
Why, I never could remember feeling this way before. A wild storm had seemed to arouse all the daring elements of my nature, until I could tie myself on deck and shout with the shrieking wind, actually mocking the curling, foam-crested breakers, as Ajax might have defied the lightning.
And now I trembled.