Thank and I listened to all this croaking with a good deal of amusement. It surely never entered my head that the prophecy of the old men might be in anyway fulfilled.
And I certainly did not feel any foredoom of peril myself. The expected gale came down. We passed within sight of the islet named Cape Horn, with a terrific wind blowing and the waves running half mast high. The Seamew had then been dropped behind. Indeed, the last we saw of her, she was wallowing in our very wake.
“Gimme a breeze like this,” roared Captain Joe from his station, to Mr. Gates and Mr. Barney, “all the way to the time we take our tug, and we’ll be eating supper in Baltimore before that Seamew sights the Capes o’ Virginia.”
But this, of course, was only brag. The Seamew was not far behind us.
And then, that very night the prophecy of ill-luck was fulfilled, at least insofar as it affected me. Something broke loose and began to slat in the tops. Mr. Gates, roaring through the captain’s speaking trumpet, shouted for all hands. We had barely got to sleep below, and I reckon I was half way up the shrouds before I got both eyes open.
It was a black night, with the wind coming in strange, uneven puffs, and the deck all a-wash with loose water. The ship was rolling till the ends of her yardarms almost dipped in the leaping waves.
My foot slipped; futilely I clutched at the brace with the tips of my fingers. I knew I was lost, and the shriek I uttered was answered by Thank’s voice as I whirled downward:
“Man overboard!”
I shot down, and down, and down—and then struck the sea and kept on descending. I thought of Mahomet’s coffin, hung between the heavens and the earth. I was hung between the ship’s keel and the bottom of the vast deep, swinging in that coffin which can never rot—the coffin of the ocean.