“I says to my mate dere in Sydney, ‘Bill,’ I says, ‘I got de old man’s dollar yet. Meppe he need it for de poys when he sing dot old hymn to-night over seas.’
“‘Do you feel uneasy like?’ Bill asks me.
“‘No,’ says I, ‘but I seems to hear the old man singing and I’m minding the old Bethel and the winter night he ban givin’ me de dollar.’ ‘Well,’ says Bill, ‘you must bring your cargo to port and get a discharge. You must show de old man dat you sail straight. That’s my verdict.’
“So we shook hands undt I go find me a berth to Manila—best I can do just then. I makes Honolulu on a Pacific Mail; but she drops me there. Then I finds de Gullwing. She iss de ship for me,” added Stronson, smiling in his simple way. “She carry me straight for Baltimore, undt I pay das dollar to Captain Sowle.”
Some of the men made a good deal of fun of Stronson because he was slow of intellect; but he was an able seaman and even the sharp-spoken Mr. Barney seemed to bear easy on the old man. He was stiff in his joints at times, for the sailor’s chief enemy, rheumatism, had got a grip on Stronson. Thank and I saved him many a job aloft, and in return he patiently set about teaching us all he knew about splicing and knotting—which was no small job for either the old man or for us.
It was soon after this that we got the four days’ gale that I, for one, shall not soon forget. The wind, however, did not increase so suddenly as before, and Captain Bowditch took warning in time and had the small sails furled. But when the gale fairly struck us we had enough lower canvas set in all good conscience. The ship fairly reeled under the sudden stroke of the blast.
With the wind, too, came the snow. Such a snowstorm I had not seen for several years, for we had had two or three mild winters in New England before I had gone to sea. We were forced to reef down the big sails, though every order from the skipper to this end was punctuated by groans. The canvas was stiff and the snow froze on it, and we had a mess. Glad was I that the work was not to be done in the tops.
A smother of snow wrapped the Gullwing about and we plunged on without an idea as to what was in our path. The lookout forward could not see to the end of the jib-boom. The sea was lashed to fury and, again and again, a wave broke over our bows and washed the deck from stem to stern. To add to the wonder of it, somewhere in the depths of the universe above us an electrical storm raged; we could hear the sullen thunder rolling from horizon to horizon. At first I had thought this was surf on the rocks and believed we were going head-on to death and destruction; but the officers knew where we were and they assured us that the chart gave us an open sea.
The decks were a mess of slush and it was dangerous to go about without hanging to the lifelines that checkrowed the Gullwing from forward of the fo’castle to the after companionway. Yet how the staunch craft sailed! She shook the waves off her back like a duck under a waterspout, and seemed to enjoy the buffeting of the sea like a thing alive.
While the storm continued we got just such food as we could grab in our fists. Nothing was safe on the table. The doctor kept the coffee hot in some magic way; yet there were times when the ship rolled so that the lids flew off his stove and the fire was dumped on the deck of the galley.