The Girl of the Golden Gate

by William Brown Meloney

She felt that even sleep must not be permitted to take him from her sight.

"You will help best by obeying orders, little woman. The first rule of the sea is obedience. Come."

Paul started aft and Emily followed him in silence. She who had never known mastership in her life went whither this man led and with no thought of doing otherwise. He handed her up on the poop over the weather gangway.

It was an exceptionally long quarter deck for a vessel of the Daphne's size. Abaft the mizzenmast and the saloon skylights stood a small teakwood deck house comfortably furnished as a sort of lounge. It was lighted by four large ports. Through the center of this house the after companionway led below. On each fore and aft side was a leather cushioned bench or divan, both long and wide enough to afford good berths on which to steal a sleep and at the same time remain within quick access of the deck. Against the forward bulkhead was a collapsible chart table. The deck entrance opened on the steering compass and the wheel. Running forward on each side of the vessel from the break of the poop to the forward house were two pipe-railed bridges. Similar bridges connected the forward house with the forecastle head. One might cover the length of the ship from the mizzenmast to the eyes of her without putting a foot on the main deck. Halfway between the mizzen and mainmasts the bridges were connected by a platform on which stood the standard compass.

It was in the companionway deck house or lounge, as the castaways came to call it, that Paul spread a berth for Emily with some blankets which he took from one of the staterooms. Although she protested that she would find it easy to remain awake if she could drink as much coffee as he had—that she really wasn't sleepy—her head had hardly touched its clean white pillow when her eyelids closed fast in a deep slumber. Sheer will power had been keeping her up.

There was grim work ahead of Paul Lavelle and he hurried to do it. It must be finished when Emily awoke. Before entering the cabin, however, he went forward and put a fire under the donkey boiler. Here was an auxiliary crew—this engine—a good thirty horsepower at least. Hope mounted in his breast as he examined it and found it in first-class condition. For that matter, everything about the Daphne was strong and good. She had been "kept up" is the way Lavelle would have described her to another seaman.

A plan of action which he had been formulating he now confirmed. He would let the Daphne lie along hove to as she was until he could fix her position and then, from that point attempt to work her, with Emily's aid and the engine's, into a frequented track of vessels. Having made such a track, he would hold on there the while he did his best to make the nearest land. If what the bark's log said were true it would not be long, the gods of the winds being kind, before they were in the track in which the Cambodia had been lost.

Thoroughly this man realized the seriousness of the situation which confronted him. Before him was a task to give any man pause—a twelve-hundred-ton bark at the mercy of the sea to be handled by himself, a woman, and a donkey engine. There was no alternative to the plan his mind had outlined. While he tested it from every angle, instinct led him to many necessary small tasks. He sounded the ship's well. There was no telling how much water might have entered her through the open fore hatch. The rod came back as dry as a bleached bone. It had not even rained since she had been abandoned. This suggested examining her fresh-water supply. He sounded these tanks. They held a supply for fifty days even if the bark had been manned by her full complement. Besides, the donkey engine had a condenser attachment for its own purposes and also for ship use in the event of a shortage.

Paul Lavelle had never been aboard a handier vessel than the Daphne. John McGavock and her young chief mate must have been very proud of her. She was molded on clipper lines. In her heyday undoubtedly, judging from the size of her mizzenmast, she had been rigged as a ship. That day had been when the taunt, white-winged tea clippers were the mail carriers and passenger greyhounds of the seas; and the men who mastered them veritable nabobs of the deep. The lounge on the Daphne's poop, the rich India teak and mahogany and bird's-eye maple of her commodious saloons, the many staterooms, the appointments of her large galley bespoke her as having been not among the least of these fliers. Certainly she must have been a flash packet in the days of her youth when she could have mustered twenty-five men in a watch to fist a topsail. Paul knew that vessels like this had carried tremendous crews—sometimes fifty, sixty, and seventy-five, idlers and all—in the days of their pride when an hour cut from a passage meant gold for owners and masters. His mother's father had been master and afterward owner of such ships as the Daphne. But he had sailed them under a different flag than hers—a flag which had driven him, the grandson, away from it and to be a marked wanderer.

This unpleasant personal thought turned Lavelle aft. He entered the cabin through the door on the starboard side. Here he found three more staterooms, which opened off an alleyway similar to the one on the opposite side. These rooms had been long given up to storage purposes. One was filled with barrels of flour and biscuits; the others held cordage and bolts of untouched canvas. He carried away a bolt of the newest, whitest duck and a coil of marlin.