The donkey man managed to get out with the rest, and the fires in starboard boilers swamped, nearly blowing up the ship as the water flooded them. It was only because there was enough water to prevent the making of steam to any great extent that saved us from having the whole midsection blown in the air.
And all the time I was holding to the bridge rail with a cyclone snoring down upon us at the rate of seventy miles an hour. Luckily the ash pipe stayed partly bolted to the skin of the bottom. That alone saved us from total loss.
Of course I knew something was wrong the minute the boilers went smothered. The terrific roar of steam and the easing of the engines told me that sure enough trouble was coming, and all the time I had been wondering how we would hold the hooker up to that gale with the full power in her.
"What's the matter—bottom blow away?" howled Boldwin, coming from the pilot house and yelling in my ear.
"God knows—anything might happen to us after last week," I howled in return, but the force of the hurricane blew the words away, and the old man went staggering and pulling himself along the rail until he managed to get below. For the next fifteen minutes on that bridge I did some small bit of thinking. Looked like all day with us. Not a sign could I get from anywhere, and of course I dared not leave the bridge. Once I thought she had blown up with powder. Next I thought the engines had gone through the bottom. And all the time I could feel her settling in that whirlwind sea—a sea torn white with the blast of the squalls that were now coming faster and faster each minute.
"Well, I'm mighty glad I'm not married, anyway," I said to myself, for it looked like the long sleep coming fast. And then I somehow thought of that Miss Docking below there in the comfortable cabin waiting for the finish. It gave me a bit of a turn, and I tried to imagine what that cabin would look like in a few minutes when the sea water swept through it with all its transoms and cushions, piano and carpet——
"Hard a starboard, sir," came the cry.
It was most welcome. Anything but that standing there waiting for the next minute to follow the last. I saw that the quartermaster swung the wheel over quickly. It was steam steering, and the ship fell off in the trough of the sea in a few minutes, the weight of the gale driving her bodily to leeward and heeling her over to quite a list.
"Heave her to," came the order passed up from the old man, and I put the wheel hard down and waited to see if she would stay without coming up. She lay easily drifting off, and while I watched her for trouble the old man sent for me. Andersen came up and took my place, and I ran down, half blown, half crawling to the shelter of the deck house, and from there below to see what had happened.
Bill Boldwin was standing at the ash chute swearing at the man from Donegal. The donkey man was trying to tell what he didn't know about his business, and all the time the water flowed freely through the one-foot pipe until it so filled the compartment that nothing more could come up through it. It was a good thing! If the whole Atlantic Ocean had been delegated to flow through that pipe, nobody was there to stop it, not a soul to say why not. And then I was aware of the stewardess standing in the press of faces, looking scared but cool.