CHAPTER V
In Which We See a Ship Sailing in the Sky
I had forgotten my own peril. Indeed, so disturbed was I for the moment for my chum’s safety that I cared nothing for the lost sail. I yelled for Thank at the top of my voice, though doubtless the shrieking of the wind drowned all sound of my cries. And Thank, for all I knew, was already far to leeward, fighting in that tempestuous sea.
And then suddenly, through a rift in the flying spray that stung my face so cruelly and almost blinded me, I beheld something swinging from the ropes on which I stood. The ship was almost on her beam-ends and the waves broke just below me. There Thank hung by his foot, which had twisted in the ropes and was held firm, his head and shoulders buried in the foaming sea at every plunge of the laboring Gullwing!
I shrieked again and, clinging with one hand with a desperate grip, I sought to seize him as he swung, pendulum-like, to and fro. I could not reach him.
But now the brave ship was righting herself. We rose higher and higher from the leaping waves. Thank swung back and forth and, as we came inboard, I feared he would batter his poor brains out against the wire cables, or against some spar.
He was unconscious. He was helpless. And it seemed as though I was helpless as well. Those few momentous seconds showed me plainly how deeply I loved the youth who had been my comrade in adventure and labor and peril during these last few months. I had never had a chum before of my own age—not one whom I had really cottoned to. Thank was as dear to me as a brother would have been.
As we rose higher and higher another fear smote me. If his foot loosened now and he fell, he would be dashed to death upon the deck below. In my struggles my hand found a loose rope. I hauled it in quickly, hung to the spar by my elbows while I formed a noose in the end, and was unsuccessfully trying to get this over Thank’s head and shoulders when another man sprang to the footrope beside me.
“Git down there and grab him!” yelled this individual in my ear. “I’ll hold you both.”
It was Bob Promise and although he was the man aboard whom I least liked, he was an angel of mercy to me just then. I knew his muscle and vigor. With one hand he clung to the rope and seized my belt with his other paw. I knew that belt would hold, and I swung myself, without question, head-downward.
It was only for a moment that he had to be under the strain of all my weight and Thank’s as well. Then I had scrambled back to the footrope, and held my chum in the hollow of my arm. Thank was half drowned, but his eyes opened and he gasped out something or other before Bob steadied us both again upon the footrope. Later I realized that he tried to say, in his cheerful way: “That’s all right, Sharp!”
Between us Bob and I managed to get him down to the deck. We should not have been able to do that without a sling had the squall not passed away and left the old Gullwing once more on a comparatively level keel.
When we landed upon the deck boards, Thank managed to stand erect. And we three shook hands with a sort of grim satisfaction. I don’t think any of us ever spoke of the event thereafter, and our mates had not seen our peril, but we three were not likely to forget it.
The old man was still careening around the quarter, like a hen on a hot skillet, fussing about the lost sails. And scarcely had the squall passed when he was ordering up new ones to replace those that had been lost. We went to work bending on the fresh sails while it was yet blowing so hard that most captains would have kept their crews out of the rigging.
I began to see that Tom Thornton had not been joking when he said that the men were paying the penalty for the skipper’s betting an apple with Captain Si Somes, of the Seamew. Had it been a thousand dollars at stake, Captain Bowditch would have been no more earnest in his determination to beat the Gullwing’s sister ship.
But the wind was little more than a stiff gale when the new sails were set and the ripping repaired. We drove along until night and then the air became very light. During the night a fog began to gather and when our watch was called at eight bells in the morning it was pretty thick.
“Looks like a Cape Horn soup,” growled old Tom, as he stepped on deck. “Though we’re a good bit of a ways from that latitude yet.”
As we stumbled around the deck, doing that everlasting cleaning up that Mr. Barney watched so sharply, the fog began to thin and waver. Somewhere overhead there was a breeze; but it was pretty near a dead calm down here on the deck of the Gullwing.
By the time the sun began to glow upon the edge of the sea, looking like a great argand lamp in the fog; overhead the billows of mist were rolling in imitation of the long, swinging swell of the sea itself. At first those billows in the sky glowed in purple, and rose hues, ever changing, magnificently beautiful! It was a seascape long to be remembered.
The sun rose higher. Its rays shot through the rolling mist like arrows. Now and then the breeze breathed on our sails and the Gullwing forged ahead at a better pace. The fog left us. We were sailing in an open space, it seemed, with the mist bank encircling us at a distance on a few cable-lengths, and the billows still rolling high above the points of our masts.
And then, to the westward, the curtains rolled back as it seemed for the scene that had been set for us. Like the stage of a great theatre, this setting of cloud and mist and heaving sea appeared, and there, sailing with her keel in the clouds, and her tapering masts and shaking sails pointing seaward, was a beautiful, misty, four-stick schooner.
“What do you know about that?” demanded Thankful Polk. “Do you see what I see, Sharp, or have I ‘got ’em?’ That ship’s upside down.”
“It’s a mirage,” I murmured.
“It’s a Jim Hickey of a sight, whatever the right name of it is,” he rejoined.
Everybody else on deck was aware of the mirage, and a chorus of exclamations arose from the watch.
“It’s the Gullwing herself!” ejaculated Bob Promise. “Of course it is! It’s a four-sticker.”
“How do you make that out?” demanded Thank. “I know derned well I ain’t standing on my head, whatever you be.”
“It’s her reflection, sawney!” said somebody else.
“Oh! well I reckoned that I knew whether I was on my head, or my heels,” chuckled the boy from Georgia.
But I had been watching the mirage very sharply. I knew just what sails were set upon the Gullwing, and I counted those upon the ship in the sky. Misty as the reflection was I could distinguish them plainly. And suddenly I saw a movement among those sails. Sharply defined figures of men swarmed into her rigging.
“That’s not the Gullwing at all!” I shouted.
“That boy’s right,” said Mr. Barney sharply, coming out of the afterhouse with his glass, and with the captain right behind him. “You’ve got good eyes on you, Webb.”
“By jinks! It’s the Seamew!” roared our skipper, the moment he set his eyes upon the mirage. “And if she’s sailing that way, she’ll never beat us to the Capes of Virginia.”
A roar of laughter greeted this joke. But the ship in the sky began immediately to fade away, and it had soon disappeared, while the wind freshened with us and we forged ahead still faster. When the fog completely disappeared there was not a sail in sight anywhere on that sea, although Mr. Barney went into the tops himself and searched the horizon with a glass.
But I know that they made a note of the appearance on the log. Some of the sailors thought the Seamew couldn’t be far from us, either head or astern; but I knew that the mirage might have reflected our sister ship hundreds of miles away. The incident gave us a deal to talk about, however, and an added savor to the race we were sailing half around the globe.