Again wheeling, this time at no more than two hundred yards, the whale charged back, not completing her semi-circle sufficiently, so that she bore down upon the schooner's bow from starboard.
The starboard rail buried under the sea as the schooner heeled to the blow, and, as she righted with a violent lurch, the water swashed across the deck to the knees of the sailors about the boat and spouted out of the port scuppers.
Mauki was sorely frightened when they brought him on board the schooner. He was a lamb led to the slaughter.
After many days on the schooner, and after beholding more land and islands than he had ever dreamed of, he was landed on New Georgia, and put to work in the field clearing jungle and cutting cane grass.
We got the schooner ready for sea, intending to leave next morning at daylight.
The roll of thunder came near, crashed over us; the schooner trembled, and the great voice went on, threatening terribly, into the distance.
They were to windward of the schooner, just ready to flirt the dory over the still sea, when sounds of woe half a mile off led them to Penn, who was careering around a fixed point, for all the world like a gigantic water-bug.
They were close to the schooner now, the other boats a little behind them.
At the same time, the
schooner began to turn upon her heel, spinning slowly, end for end, across the current.
I drifted slowly from the
schooner. In a kind of stupor I watched all hands take to the rigging, and slowly but surely she came round to the wind; the sails fluttered, and then bellied out as the wind came into them.
And whenever a longshoreman remembered something against a scow-
schooner sailor, or vice versa, or an oyster pirate remembered or was remembered, a fist shot out and another fight was on.
It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal- hunting
schooner. Cabin-boy!
Such time as he could find from the many duties which had devolved upon him in the matter of obtaining and outfitting the
schooner, and signing her two mates and crew of fifteen, had been spent with his employer's daughter.
For reasons I shall not mention, by paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of my manhood and the prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and racing younger sons had nothing on me, I found myself master and owner of a
schooner so well known that she shall remain historically nameless.
I shall go down to Sydney on the next steamer, and I'll come back in a second-hand
schooner. I should be able to buy one for five or six thousand dollars--"
