It blew so fresh that night and next day, however, that the sea ran too high to enable me to get below among the cases. It was a spell of wild, hard weather for that part of the world, though it never blew so fierce as to oblige us to heave-to.
The gale held steady on the quarter and we stormed along, the white seas rising in clouds as high as the foretop and blowing ahead like vast bursts of steam from the hatchway.
Greaves pressed the brig, and she rushed through the surge in madness. I never before saw a vessel spring through the seas as did the Black Watch at this time under a single-reefed foresail and double-reefed topsails. She’d be in a smother forward, just a seething dazzle of yeast ’twixt the forecastle rails, everything hidden that way in a snowstorm, so that you’d think the whole length of her was thundering into the boiling whiteness about her bows; but in a breath she’d leap, black and streaming, to the height of the lifting sea, with a toss of the head that filled the wind with crystals and prisms of brine, while a long-drawn whistling and hooting came out of the fabric of her slanting masts, and the water blew forward in white smoke from the gushing scuppers.
Then came a change; the dawn of the third morning painted a delicate lilac along the eastern sky, and when the sun rose over the wide Pacific the morning was one of cloudless splendor.
At eight o’clock Yan Bol came aft to take charge of the deck. I told him that presently we would be going into the lazarette to take stock of the cases of silver, and that the captain would keep a lookout while he was below.
A dull light glittered in the eyes of the big Dutchman. He grinned and said, “Vill not she be a long shob, Mr. Fielding?”
“Yes,” said I.
“How long shall she take a man to gount a tousand dollars? Und dere vhas hoondreds und tousands of dollars to gount below.”
“Do you think I mean to count the dollars?”
“Yaw.”