“Git down there and grab him!” yelled this individual in my ear. “I’ll hold you both.”
It was Bob Promise and although he was the man aboard whom I least liked, he was an angel of mercy to me just then. I knew his muscle and vigor. With one hand he clung to the rope and seized my belt with his other paw. I knew that belt would hold, and I swung myself, without question, head-downward.
It was only for a moment that he had to be under the strain of all my weight and Thank’s as well. Then I had scrambled back to the footrope, and held my chum in the hollow of my arm. Thank was half drowned, but his eyes opened and he gasped out something or other before Bob steadied us both again upon the footrope. Later I realized that he tried to say, in his cheerful way: “That’s all right, Sharp!”
Between us Bob and I managed to get him down to the deck. We should not have been able to do that without a sling had the squall not passed away and left the old Gullwing once more on a comparatively level keel.
When we landed upon the deck boards, Thank managed to stand erect. And we three shook hands with a sort of grim satisfaction. I don’t think any of us ever spoke of the event thereafter, and our mates had not seen our peril, but we three were not likely to forget it.
The old man was still careening around the quarter, like a hen on a hot skillet, fussing about the lost sails. And scarcely had the squall passed when he was ordering up new ones to replace those that had been lost. We went to work bending on the fresh sails while it was yet blowing so hard that most captains would have kept their crews out of the rigging.
I began to see that Tom Thornton had not been joking when he said that the men were paying the penalty for the skipper’s betting an apple with Captain Si Somes, of the Seamew. Had it been a thousand dollars at stake, Captain Bowditch would have been no more earnest in his determination to beat the Gullwing’s sister ship.
But the wind was little more than a stiff gale when the new sails were set and the ripping repaired. We drove along until night and then the air became very light. During the night a fog began to gather and when our watch was called at eight bells in the morning it was pretty thick.
“Looks like a Cape Horn soup,” growled old Tom, as he stepped on deck. “Though we’re a good bit of a ways from that latitude yet.”
As we stumbled around the deck, doing that everlasting cleaning up that Mr. Barney watched so sharply, the fog began to thin and waver. Somewhere overhead there was a breeze; but it was pretty near a dead calm down here on the deck of the Gullwing.