That was all she heard. She did not understand for the moment what he meant. Then, it dawned upon her wondering consciousness that he wanted a piece of tobacco. A piece of tobacco! Her brain pounded on this as if it would never let the thought go. She fought her way into the lounge, and as she went she remembered a box of oaky, black slabs which she had seen in the slop-chest litter. She had reached the bottom of the companion way when the Daphne gave a shuddering leap. It hurled the girl across the saloon to leeward. She caught the knob of a stateroom door and dragged herself from her knees to her feet. Looking forward, through the port alleyway, she saw a flood of water pouring in through the door opening out on the main deck.
Instinct carried Emily to this breach in the wall of the bark's defense. She got her back to the door, like a woman of the Zuyder Zee warding a broken dyke gate, and she closed it. The strength of the primitive fighting man's woman was hers in the struggle which accomplished this. She cried in anger as she bolted the teakwood slab against the ravaging waters. Yet with this thing done, her first thought was that she must get back to the wheel with a piece of tobacco. Going aft, she did not notice that the derelict's berth was empty, but the man at the wheel knew that the stranger was not there.
Hardly had Emily left the deck when the fore lower topsail went tattering out of its bolt ropes. The Daphne shook herself as if freed from a leash. The man who watched nodded in approval. Had it been possible for him to have cut this sail away when the main upper topsail had gone he would have done it. In the moment that he nodded he saw the flash of a man's face going over the rail in the welter to leeward. The face was calm. Death seemed already to have masked it. It was the derelict going away.
"Why, that—that's Driscoll—the quartermaster who was with me—stood by me—the night the Yakutat was lost!"
It was thus in the instant that the sea gulped Daniel McGovern that recognition flashed into Paul Lavelle's mind. But as the thought formed he put it away from him. His eyes were tricking him. A man can't stand for six, seven, or eight hours—he had lost count of time—staring at a compass card which whirls and dips like a crazy roulette wheel at Macao and trust his sight. After Chang had spent a twelve-hour trick at the Kau Lung's wheel he had imagined many strange things. The quartermaster, Driscoll, had been lost these ten years past—ten years this very month of March. And the sea was trying to make him believe that the derelict was he: endeavoring to trick his brain because it couldn't beat him any other way. This thought refueled his rage.
The belly of the spanker split from head to foot with the sharp staccato-rattling of a Gatling. The helmsman's senses apprehended it as it happened. Before the Daphne's head had fallen off half a point at this sudden release of pressure on her after part Lavelle had met it.
Emily, struggling to force the lounge door open against the gale, saw and heard the spanker go. It dazed her to note that Lavelle did not glance up. She had to throw herself flat on the deck to get to the wheel. Crawling up under Paul's lee she held the tobacco up in front of him, keenly wondering what he meant to do with it. She had been able to imagine only that he intended to use it in some mysterious way in connection with the compass; perhaps to keep the card from rolling and whirling. Paul settled the mystery quickly by wolfing a corner of the black plug. He nodded with satisfaction as his jaws closed on it. It seemed fantastic to the girl. She could have screamed in delight—she who had loathed tobacco chewers as long as she could remember. The incident was fraught with a message of hope that words could not have conveyed.
By signs Paul made Emily understand that she was to fill and trim the binnacle lamp. This task took her below to levy on the oil in the derelict's lamp and the lamp in the medicine chest. Then it was she discovered that Daniel McGovern had left the Daphne. She realized how the alleyway door had come to be open, but at the time her senses were beyond apprehending that a stranger had come out of the sea and gone back to it. She levied upon the storerooms again and crawled up into the lounge. The silver watch said noon. The barometer stood at 28:01! When she tried to open the door and get back to Paul with food and this news, she could not budge it more than an inch. The gale held it. She looked out of the after weather port. Through the flying spume she saw Paul glance up. His eyes rested on her for a second. He shook his head for her to stay where she was.
There came a lull at three o'clock. Emily's recruited strength enabled her to fight her way to the wheel with another can of tomatoes and some crackers. She replaced the lighted binnacle lamp. It went out. Four times she had to return to the lounge and relight it before she succeeded in spiting the gale. As she straightened up finally in success, she saw Paul's gaze shoot up to windward.
Not three hundred yards away and abreast of the Daphne drove a big four-masted, painted-port bark—a bulk of twenty-five hundred tons—under a reefed foresail and a reefed main lower topsail. For a breath her midship section hung poised on a peak of water, the rest of her red underbody, fore and aft, clear of the welter. Her poles pierced the lowering sky. The peak dropped from under her like the jet of a fountain ceasing. She fell away into a cañon, wave-walled higher than her tops. The wind went out of her foresail. The topsail drooped. She paused in her flight like a wounded bird, reeled helplessly; and then the wall of water over her stem fell, pooping her. A huddle of men started from around the foot of her jiggermast. One of them in bright yellow oilskins reached the doomed thing's port rail and waved to the Daphne high over him as if cheering her on. Another wall of water and still a third crashed upon her. Her bows rose. Stern first she went down to the port of missing ships, a hurricane shrieking her requiem.