CHAPTER XII
In Which the Captain’s Dog Goes Overboard
The heavy weather could not last forever; we came to a comparatively calmer season of several days. But the Gullwing was not sighted and I began to be worried. So many things might easily happen to her. The officers and crew of the Seamew were interested in finding the sister ship, too; but their comments upon her absence were neither kindly nor cheering.
“Is she still ahead, or has she sunk?” demanded Cap’n Si, after an examination of the entire circle of sea through his glass.
“I bet we’ve sailed clean around her,” said the first mate, chuckling. “She’s in the discard.”
“No,” said Cap’n Si. “It couldn’t be that.”
“She’s reached land, then,” grinned the mate pointing downward.
I thought that after all, both the crew and officers of the Seamew were little like my friends aboard the Gullwing. But we had such fitful winds for a time and made so little speed, that I reckon all hands were badly rasped.
We sighted several craft in these seas—all windjammers; but none of them proved to be our sister ship. We were now in the South Atlantic, and had clawed well off from the threatening rocks of Terra del Fuego. We had passed from one great sea to another, and the prow of the Seamew was turned northward. She was headed for home in earnest.
The men and officers were decent enough to me. I had been drafted into the mate’s watch and I was smart at my duties and had learned a deal aboard the Gullwing which came into good play aboard her sister ship. But I wasn’t happy.
The captain had a big Newfoundland dog aboard—Major. He was the pet of the crew and was a good fellow. Every day that it was not too rough he went overboard for his bath—usually in a sling made of an old sail, although in these waters there was not so much danger of sharks as in the more tropical seas.
However, there were other wicked marine creatures—far more blood-thirsty than Mr. Shark. And we had occasion to find this fact out for ourselves within a few days of my coming aboard the Seamew so strangely.
We had a morning when the sea was almost calm. The wind scarcely gave the ship headway, and the canvas slatted and hung dead, from time to time. We all “whistled for a breeze.”
Along about the middle of the morning watch a school of porpoises came into view. First we saw them in a string to windward, and stories of sea-serpents, told by both seamen and landsmen, came to my mind. In the distance, following one another with an undulating motion through the short seas, the porpoises looked like one enormously long creature—a huge serpent indeed.
The porpoises struck a school of small fish nearby and then there was fun. The big fish sported all around the ship, rolling and bouncing through the water in much excitement.
The Captain’s dog likewise grew excited. He ran to the open rail and barked and yapped at the sea-pigs; and I believe that one of the men slyly “set him on” at the porpoises.
However, to the surprise of the watch on deck (the captain was below), Major suddenly leaped the rail and went plump into the water.
“Hi, there!” cried Job Perkins. “That dog’ll git inter trouble; and then what will Cap’n Si say?”
I fancy the surprise of the porpoises when Major got among them was quite as great as the amazement of the men on the deck of the slow moving Seamew. The schooner was just slipping through the sea, the short waves lapping against her hull very gently. Major could easily have kept up with us.
The porpoises were sailing around and around the ship by this time, and the big dog bounced among them, barking and biting—or trying to bite—and otherwise acting like a mad dog. He plunged first for one porpoise, then for another, rising as lightly as a dog of cork on the waves, and throwing himself about in great abandon.
He so excited the porpoises that they made a general charge upon him. The dog beat a retreat in a hurry; but the sea-pigs had their “dander up” now and a score of them followed him, jumping, snorting, and tumbling about, evidently much delighted at putting the black stranger to flight.
Major came towards the ship with a rush—his only refuge. The men cheered him excitedly; and the watch below was aroused and rushed up to see what was going on. So did Captain Somes appear, and the moment he saw the dog with the big fish after him, he sang out for the sling and scolded us unmercifully for letting Major overboard.
I verily believe that the porpoises would have torn the noble fellow to shreds in a very few minutes. When Major came over the side, he was cut in several places and one of his ears hung from a thread or little more. I learned then that, although the porpoise is such a playful creature, and apparently harmless, it has means of defending itself not to be sneered at!
I was leaning on the forward port rail, looking idly across the stretch of comparatively quiet sea (the porpoises having rushed away to lee’ard), when I saw rising to the surface not many furlongs from the ship’s side, a great brownish mass that I took to be seaweed.
After a storm we often met fields of rock weed, wrenched from the shallow banks underneath the ocean by the terrific waves. This rising mass was not much different—in first appearance—from many weed-fields I had seen.
Mr. Alfred Barney was seldom on deck without his fowling-piece—a beautiful, double-barreled shotgun—in weather like this. He was a splendid wing shot and seemed to delight in bringing a gull flapping down into the sea, although he never shot at albatross.
“What you looking at, Webb?” he demanded of me, suddenly, coming around the corner of the forward house, gun in hand.
“Why, sir,” said I, just making up my mind that I had made a mistake in my first diagnosis of the nature of the brown mass that had now risen to the surface, “why, sir, I believe it is something alive.”
“Something alive?”
“That thing off there,” I replied, pointing to the object that had attracted my attention.
He stepped to my side quickly and shaded his eyes under the palm of his hand as he gazed at the peculiar looking brown patch.
“A whale’s back?” I suggested, as he remained silent.
“No. It hasn’t got slope enough,” replied Mr. Alf Barney. “By George, though! it’s alive.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “I believed it moved—there!”
A tremor of life seemed to seize the object and passed all through it. Whatever it was, its length was fifty or sixty feet.
“Maybe it’s dying,” I said. “Some great beast——”
“Not a bat-fish,” he muttered, half raising his rifle.
“No, sir. I don’t see either head or tail to it.”
It moved again—rather, it quivered. I can scarcely express the feeling of horror and dislike for the thing that came over me. I shuddered.
“I wish it would go away,” I muttered.
Mr. Barney laughed, shortly. He raised his gun again. Suddenly we heard a sharp, mandatory voice behind us:
“Don’t do that, Mr. Barney!”
We both turned. It was the mate, Mr. Hollister. He was a dark, stern, silent man, who spoke to the men without much bustle, but who evidently expected to be obeyed the first time.
“That’s a giant squid, Mr. Barney,” said the mate. “He’s ‘bad medicine.’ You don’t want to fool with one of those fellows. I did so once to my sorrow.”