Chapter XVII: The Storm

We heard the _Walrus_ before we had sight of her--the slatting of a head-sail, a rattling block, a vague creak of cordage. Then an impression of a mighty shadow, a towering spiderweb of spars and lacy rigging, stealing ghost-like from the enshrouding dark.

She floated nearer. Nearer still. And nearer. It seemed that the two vessels must collide, and the suspense became unbearable. I wondered at my great-uncle’s restraint. Would he never--I gasped with relief as his cool, even tones clove the silence.

“Touch off, Coupeau.”

Crash! The deck leaped underfoot; the anchored hull surged forward. A red sheet of flame girdled the _James’_ side, and in the instant’s glare the _Walrus_ was revealed in stark detail against a setting of glittering, black water and low, forested shores. I saw a man in her foretop, aimlessly balancing a grenade. I saw men staring curiously from the gunports as our broadside smashed into them. I had a glimpse of the brutal face of Bones, peering over the bulwarks, a cutlass in his teeth.

The darkness returned, and a multitude of echoes dinned back and forth across the inlet. There was a rending and cracking of timbers, with such screams as I never hope to hear again, the screams of wicked men who face an unexpected death, oaths and blasphemy and piteous appeals, all blended into one terrible, heart-searching whole.

My great-uncle’s level voice dominated the confusion as easily as it had the silence.

“Cut your cable, Saunders!”

Flint’s bellow answered from the _Walrus_.

“Give it to ’em, ye cowardly swabs! Stand to your guns!”

The red tongues of the _Walrus’_ guns licked out at us; the staggering roar of their discharging smote the night. The fabric of the _Royal James_ quivered and shook as the iron hail lashed into her. A moaning and screeching rose from waist, fo’csle and gundeck:

“Oh, God!”

“My leg! My leg!”

“It hurts! Sweet Christ, how it----”

“They’re out! My guts are a-runnin’ out!”

“Where’s my arm? Oh, God, where’s my arm?”

But a third time my great-uncle mastered the uproar.

“Make sail, Martin!”

Coupeau had reloaded his guns, and the _James_ fired a second broadside with the same crushing unanimity as before. The _Walrus_ receded as if our fire had had the effect of physically repelling her from us. Clouds of smoke came between the ships, and I perceived that we were benefiting from the severing of the anchor-cable. The ebb tide was already sweeping us down the Anchorage toward the open sea.

The _Walrus_ shot off another ragged broadside, which for the most part splashed water or scattered mud, and then settled to a pegging chase, the Long Toms on her fo’csle barking fitfully as they tossed the twelve-pound shot athwart our decks. Our guns were silent. Our gundeck spewed forth men, whom Martin hustled to the yards to shake out every sail to catch the errant wind that veered gustily from southeast to southwest.

Colonel O’Donnell waved his fist at my great-uncle.

“What madness will have taken ye now, Murray?” he cried. “There was the grand chance ye had to finish the rascals once and for all. Are ye feared of them that ye turn tail--you that ha’ struck first blow; aye, and second, too?”

“Not at all, sir,” rejoined my great-uncle. “Having struck first blow and second blow, as you so aptly phrase it, I am of a mind to strike also the _coup de grace_. And this with as trifling damage to my own vessel as is possible.”

“Man, you’ll never have another such chance as that ye just cast away,” mourned the Irishman.

“For a soldier, _chevalier_, you reveal astonishing lack of judgment,” returned my great-uncle. “Had I remained to finish conclusions with Captain Flint in the narrow space of the anchorage I might conceivably have gained the victory, but it must have been by means of subordinating brains to brawn, and with loss in proportion thereto. I prefer to force him to sea, where, by maneuvering and proper strategy, I can secure the same object at a half or a third of the cost.”

“’Tis all the same,” retorted O’Donnell. “If ye sink him, ye lose his treasure.”

“Quite true,” assented Murray. “But what would you say to driving him ashore, eh?”

What O’Donnell would have answered to this I know not; for there was a sudden drumming of feet on the deck, and Moira cast herself into his arms.

“Oh, _padre_,” she cried tearfully, “and are ye safe from the cannon? I waked in my bed with their roaring, and it came over me we were on the _Santissima Trinidad_ once more, and poor Señor Nunez, the apothecary, groaning from his death-wound--and him that was looking forward to the quiet end of his days in the little house by Alcantara!

“And then I was thinking ’twas all a horrid dream. But the cannon blatted again, and the ship trembled, and there was a shriek at my very door. So out I ran in my shift, and Diomede the blackamoor was lying in his blood on the cabin floor, and Ben Gunn beside him a-praying. And with that I put on me enough clothing for decency’s sake, and came to find ye, for my four bones are clattering with fear, and that’s Heaven’s truth!”

O’Donnell drew her close.

“There, there, acushla,” he said with a tenderness he had only for her. “The worst will be over. There’s naught for ye to fear.”

She reached up and stroked his face.

“Troth, and I was thinking that same if I could but come at you, _padre_,” says she. “But ’tis terrible fearsome to be sleeping by your lone self, and awake in the midst of a sea-fight.”

Her father swore under his breath.

“Ah, ’tis I was the weak, foolish fellow to drag you into such a venture! There’ll come a day I must answer----”

She stopped his mouth with her hand.

“As if I’d be anywhere else than just here!”

I turned my head, not wishing to be prying into their affairs, and a quarter-mile astern I saw a jet of flame and heard the smacking report of one of the _Walrus’_ chase-guns.

Moira said something more that I did not hear, and he interrupted her.

“Get ye below, my maid until we----”

There was a harsh, whistling sound in the air, and the hairs on one side of my head rose up, and on the heels of this came the thud of a shot as it struck timber.

“Close, egad!” commented my great-uncle.

O’Donnell swayed strangely and drooped over his daughter’s shoulder.

“_Padre!_” The dazed grief in her voice was tragical. “Why won’t ye stand? Are ye hit? Oh, blessed Virgin, there’s no sense left in him! Bob, Master Peter, help me! He’s so--so--heavy.”

Peter and I jumped to aid her, and Murray was not far behind us. We lowered O’Donnell’s tall body to the deck, and I ran for a lanthorn. When I returned with it my great-uncle had assumed command of the situation.

“We can feel no blood or broken bones,” he said. “Hold your light here by his head, if you please, Robert.”

The yellow glow played over the Irishman’s long face. His lips were drawn back in what had been a smile; his eyes were fixed and glassy; no pulse beat in his corded throat. Moira crouched beside him, chafing his limp hands and crooning a medley of endearments in English, Irish and Spanish. Murray, opposite her, thrust exploring fingers into the bosom of her father’s shirt. A startled look appeared in my great-uncle’s lambent eyes, but his features preserved their immobility.

“’Tis useless to cry to him, lass,” he said gently. “He doth not answer, you see.”

“But he will!” she protested. “Sure, ye must soon be finding what is wrong with him, sir. It may be a sup of brandy would bring him round.”

My great-uncle reached across and plucked from her grasp the hand she had been rubbing.

“Come,” he said, rising, “we will ask Peter to carry him to his berth, shall we?”

“But--but--we must bring him to!”

“We can not bring him to,” he answered kindly.

She stood up, bewildered.

“Not--bring--him--to? But why?”

“Because his heart no longer beats,” said my great-uncle. “Quick! Catch her, Robert.”

She lay like a tired child in my arms.

“Dead!” she murmured faintly.

“He can not be dead!” I exclaimed. “There’s not a wound on him.”

“_Neen_,” said Peter.

He picked up the lanthorn from where I had dropped it on the deck and directed the light upon the upper part of Colonel O’Donnell’s head. A blue bruise like a scar was spread across the Irishman’s left temple.

“A graze-shot,” pronounced Peter. “Der cannonball came dot close. _Ja_!”

“But the skin is not even broken,” I objected.

“_Ja_, but dot don’t matter.”

Murray bent over and fingered the bruise.

“Peter is right,” he said. “’Twas the concussion affected the brain. I have heard of such a freak shot, but never seen it happen before.”

Moira clung to my arms.

“And he is really dead? The _padre_ is really dead? And he unshriven, without a comfort of the Church! Oh, holy saints, be his advocates! Sure, was there ever a crueler end?”

She collapsed in a passion of weeping.

“Conduct her below, Robert,” said my great-uncle. “We will follow you.”

She suffered me to lead her from the poop without objection, more like a child than ever, sobbing and protesting and repeating the same things over and over again, in an abandonment of grief which only the Irish can attain.

“’Tis you are the kind friend,” she stammered when we had reached her stateroom, “And oh, Bob, I have the sore need of you, I that am an orphan in a pirate ship. Troth, I haven’t a friend in the wide world unless it be you and Master Corlaer. But I am the bad, selfish girl to be thinking of my own plight, and the father that loved me this moment gone up to Peter’s Gate, and him without the holy wafer to his lips or so much as a prayer said over him. Ah, what ill deed did we do, either one of us, that he should be taken from me so, without a word of parting? The sisters were always after saying we must reconcile ourselves to God’s mercy, but ’tis little mercy has been shown to me.”

I quieted her at last, brought her a swallow of brandy and induced her to lie down.

“I mustn’t be crying the way I will have done,” she apologized, gulping her sobs. “Himself will be needing all the prayers I can say, and a boiling of candles, too. Do you go on, Bob--only promise you’ll not leave me by my lone if there’s more fighting. I could never stand to hear the thundering of the cannon after--after--that--and no one by to bid me take heart o’ grace.”

The gray dawnlight was seeping through the stern windows when I rejoined my great-uncle and Peter in the main cabin. Peter was as placid as ever, puffing industriously at a long clay pipe; but my relative displayed more concern than I remembered to have observed in him at any time in the past.

“I trust you were able to calm the poor lass?” he greeted me. “Stap me, what a sorry business! I’d never have chosen O’Donnell for a traveling companion, but without him I know not what to do. The whole venture----”

He shook his head and stared out the window beside him, clicking the lid of his snuffbox open and shut.

“But we have first to attend to the _Walrus_,” he added presently. “I shall do so with the less reluctance after that last shot. The cursed luck of it! A beaten enemy’s blow in the dark, blindfolded, by gad! And to think it must strike down of all men the one most essential to my schemes. I could-- Well, well, no matter! We must triumph over the unexpected. ’Tis the chasm all great leaders must cross to win the final victory.”

I found myself somehow instinctively hostile to his attitude.

“What have you done with Colonel O’Donnell?” I asked coldly.

“Peter carried him to his stateroom. We will give him decent burial when we return to the island. And perhaps some day we can come for him in state with a squadron of King’s ships and bear him home to a grave in the land he was exiled from.”

My great-uncle’s spirits brightened noticeably as he contemplated the picture his words presented.

“Yes, yes,” he murmured half to himself. “What O’Donnell could have done surely I can do. Our friends in Avignon will help. And Robert!”

He turned to me.

“Ah, my boy, this unfortunate incident is my best justification for pressing you in my cause. What should I do without you and Peter? ’Twill be for you two, with Mistress Moira, to establish our connections with the king’s agents in France.”

“You seem to forget I am no Jacobite,” I answered unpleasantly.

“Tut, tut, you shall be as stout a Jacobite as Prince Charles himself.”

“Not I!”

He smiled.

“We’ll leave that to Mistress Moira.”

“Maybe you forget der _Walrus_,” interposed Peter.

“Not so, Peter. I shall dispose of the _Walrus_ within the next few hours.”

“Andt _Gott_,” added Peter as if Murray had not spoken.

My great-uncle laughed merrily.

“My dear Peter, men of judgment will inform you that there is no God--or, if we concede a God, there is every reason to assign a superior degree of power to the inevitable Devil representing the opposing virtue of godliness. Indeed, did I incline to bow down before any superhuman authority I should elect Satan by preference. But a ripe experience has inclined me to the view that the Devil is as much a figment of men’s imaginations as God. Since the beginning of recorded time a priestly caste-- But here we are drifting into a philosophical discussion; and as you very properly reminded me, the _Walrus_ awaits our attention. Let us go on deck.”

“Der wise man don’t know eferyt’ing,” answered Peter. “_Neen_!”

“Essentially true,” agreed my great-uncle. “I must confess myself ignorant of such staple points as why we are here, the excuse for human existence, the relative significance of this world of ours, the utility of the differing qualities of goodness and evil. But any serious consideration, friend Peter, must convince as profound a thinker as yourself that the very existence of men and women is of itself prima-facie evidence that there can be no Divine Author of omnipotent or sentient powers.”

“We better go on deck,” said Peter.

“After you,” protested my relative as we rose. “’Tis a pleasure to debate with you, Peter. Take care, pray! Gunn has not removed all of the evidence of Diomede’s passing. Strange, is it not, how a black fellow like Diomede and a man who hath been the confidant of princes like O’Donnell should both be abolished by a simple organic disruption? That alone, Peter, should suffice to disprove the humbug of an all-wise Providence. An all-wise Providence, forsooth! Here am I, arranging to reconstruct for the better a most unhappy trio of kingdoms, with consequences bound to improve the well-being of the entire world, and my plan is suffered to be placed in jeopardy by an ignorant sailor’s blind shot in the dark! What could be more absurd?”

Peter did not answer him, and we passed out upon the maindeck, where sailors were busy removing the traces of the _Walrus’_ first broadside which had wrought a certain amount of minor damage and caused the deaths of several men. ’Twas now light enough to see about us, but the light was of a quality I had never known before--a hard, coppery glare, with the sun obscured from view. The sea was quite flat, and the wind continued intermittent, veering from one-quarter of the south to the other. Spy-glass Island lay to larboard, its contour amazingly distinct--as if it were bitten into the frame of steel-blue sea and dully shimmering sky that encompassed it. The _Walrus_, like the _James_, had cleared Captain Kidd’s Anchorage, and was running due north before the wind betwixt us and the islet called Skeleton Island.

Murray bent a shrewd eye aloft and hailed Martin.

“How is it you carry no sail on the mizzen?” he demanded.

“Account o’ that there last ---- ---- ---- shot, cap’n,” answered the mate, tugging his forelock. “If ye look to it ye’ll see as how a ---- ---- twelve-pounder bored into her.”

We all followed his pointing finger to a gouge beneath the mizzen yard. The shot that had grazed Colonel O’Donnell’s head had done more than graze the mizzen. The mast was whittled away to a depth of several inches as cleanly as if a giant’s ax had chopped into it.

My great-uncle took snuff very slowly.

“What luck! What luck!” he muttered.

And then louder:

“’Twas an expensive shot for us, gadzooks! Well, Martin, we must fish the mast at our earliest opportunity, but we can make shift to corner Flint without it. The _Walrus_ is foul and heavy in the water. The _James_ can sail circles round her in this wind.”

There was a worried look in Martin’s weather-beaten face.

“Askin’ your pardon, sir, I don’t like this ---- ---- wind. We’re in for a ---- of a storm or I’m a ---- ---- ---- lubber.”

My great-uncle shrugged his shoulders.

“Storm or no storm, Martin, the _Walrus_ carries nigh four hundred thousand pounds.”

“Aye, sir; and by your favor, best sink her and be done wi’ it and run for shelter.”

“Sink her! Man, we’d lose the treasure.”

“Better lose the _Walrus’_ treasure than go down ourselves,” insisted Martin doggedly. “Have it your own way, sir, but I’m a ---- ---- ---- if it ain’t fixin’ to blow up one o’ these here tarrible Caribbee storms as pluck the hairs outn your head.”

Murray regarded the four quarters of the sky for several moments.

“With your prognostications I find no quarrel, Martin,” he said finally; “but I believe we have ample time to head the _Walrus_. Flint dares not run south because he knows the hornet’s nest we have stirred up in those seas. My purpose is to box him in and force him to beach. If this wind continues we should bring him to book on the north coast of the island, and so soon as the _Walrus_ has taken ground we will wear and beat in for the North Inlet. Doth that satisfy you?”

The mate hesitated.

“You be cap’n, sir. But if ’twas my say we’d head back in to the Anchorage, _Walrus_ or no _Walrus_.”

My great-uncle stiffened.

“’Tis impossible,” he replied haughtily. “However, we will bear up for the _Walrus_, and you may bid Coupeau to see what harm he can contrive against her with his chase-guns.”

Martin saluted and went for’ard. My great-uncle led us to the poop.

“Your old sailor is eke much of an old woman into the bargain,” he remarked perfunctorily, climbing the sta’b’d ladder ahead of me. “Let him but sniff the approach of a tempest, and he is all for the nearest haven--aye, the hardiest buccaneer no less than the law-abiding merchantman.”

“O’Donnell was right, it seems, when he advised you to finish the task you had begun in the inlet,” I snapped, none too pleased, myself, with the outlook.

“In that case, my dear nephew, a half of us must have perished,” retorted my relative. “You have had some experience of these wolves of ours when their lusts are roused. No, no; I am no milk-and-water fighter, but I prefer to batter my enemy safely at long range rather than give him an equal opportunity to tear my throat.”

Peter grunted.

“You said?” Murray inquired courteously.

“_Neen_, I saidt not’ings. But I t’ink--I t’ink it is all right if you get der _Walrus_ and yourself come safe. If you don’t do bot’ it don’t matter if you do der odder; _neen_.”

My great-uncle raised his prospect-glass.

“You have ably stated one of the primary rules of success in any branch of warfare, friend Peter,” he said. “Captain Flint is making better going of it than I had expected. Apparently by some perversity of our continuing ill-luck he hath a more constant wind close under the island than we out here. Ah! I hear Coupeau’s bark.”

A cloud of smoke rolled aft as the long eighteen on the la’b’d side of the _James’_ fo’csle boomed. The shot dashed up a fountain of water a few feet ahead of the _Walrus_, which was now running neck and neck with us. Flint replied with one of his long twelves, but the shot fell short, and he edged away as much as he dared, which was very little, for Murray had seen to it that he had bare sailing-room. Our chase-gun barked again, and this time the round shot ricocheted from the water’s surface and slapped into the _Walrus’_ hull.

“Neat,” commented my great-uncle; “but what we require is a fair hit on a spar.”

Coupeau realized as much, as was evidenced by his next two shots going high and striking the water beyond the target. But I was distracted from watching his efforts, for at the fifth discharge Moira O’Donnell crept up the poop ladder, her eyes wide with misgiving.

“Troth, yourself promised only a few minutes since you’d not leave me by my lone was there more fighting, Bob,” she reproached me.

“’Tis no fight,” I answered.

“Aye, we do but seek to drive yonder knaves ashore,” Murray assured her. “They can not reach us at this distance.”

She surveyed the scene with a doubting eye and was constrained to credit us.

“But why is the light so strange?” she demanded. “’Tis as if the door of a cookstove was ajar.”

“We are in for bad weather, sweet,” replied my great-uncle. “You must go below.”

But she shrank away from him and clutched firmly an arm of Peter and me, each.

“No, no, I’ll not be going down there again,” she cried. “On the inside of a door I can think of naught but the sorrow that is come upon me. I’ll stay up here in the open.”

“Certes, this will be no safe place in a storm,” I urged.

But she clung the tighter to us.

“I’ll not go down. I’d sooner be taken by the pirates than go down. Down there the noises of the water and the ship will be like the crying of the banshee in the Green Room where grandfather died. No, no! In the cabin there is only death, and the light is dim, and the noises will be whispering at my elbow the livelong time. I’ll have none of it! Sure, I care not what danger there is, if I can stay up here and meet it in the open.”

“We let you stay,” said Peter soothingly. “_Ja_, we better let der little gal stay, Murray. Bob andt I, we take care of her.”

“That will we,” I endorsed him.

My great-uncle eyed me a thought quizzically.

“You are, it seems, subject to change of opinion, Robert,” he remarked. “By all means let Moira remain with us. I daresay she’ll be none the worse for a wetting.”

But the storm held off throughout our morning-long chase down the east coast of the island and then out to sea to herd the _Walrus_ in from the north. Coupeau hulled the miserable craft again and again, and shot away her foretopmast; but she steadily clawed offshore and made desperate attempts to steal ahead of us and win a clear path before the wind, and when, toward noon, the breeze died completely the positions of the two vessels were practically the same as they had been from the beginning of the cat-and-mouse game that Murray played.

The _Royal James_, by nimbler handling, had gained in the last hour, and was more than a cannon-shot to the north-west of the _Walrus_, with the northernmost of the island’s chain of hills--the one the pirates called the Foremast Hill--almost due southeast of us. If the wind sprang up again in anything like the same quarter the _Walrus_ was fast in Murray’s trap. She would have the choice of two alternatives: She could stand on and fight, with the practical certainty of destruction for all hands, or she could drive ashore, in which case the crew might take to the woods, with every prospect of eluding pursuit, unless Murray made a determined effort to comb the island’s craggy recesses. After the long-range battering they had received all morning, on top of the hammering in the action in the dark, there was not much doubt that the _Walrus’_ disorderly crew would take the decision into their own hands and choose the latter as offering a fair chance of life, no matter how circumscribed.

The helmsman had just turned the hour-glass, which lay beside the compass in the hooded box in front of the steering-wheel, when a shout came from Martin, who was half-way up the main-rigging, sweeping the horizon with a glass. My great-uncle had been pondering the desirability of getting out the boats and undertaking to tow the _James_ within range of the long eighteens, and he called back--

“Is it wind?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” roared Martin--and there was no mildness now in the old fellow’s tones. “There’s the ---- ----est blow o’ wind as ever came out o’ the ---- ---- bowels o’ the sky or I’m a ---- ---- swab as ever was.”

He tumbled from the ratlines and ran aft to the break of the poop, his face lifted earnestly in appeal.

“Best let me lay an ax to the mizzen, sir,” he called.

My great-uncle took snuff, calmly deliberate.

“Curb your fears, Martin,” he answered. “I have weathered a lifetime of gales in the _Royal James_. Take in sail, of course; but if we sacrificed a mast needlessly ’twould cripple us for weeks. Where away is this wind?”

Martin waved an arm across the northwestern arc of the horizon.

“Look for yourself, cap’n. I be an old man, and I never seed the like.”

Murray’s reply was to swarm up the mizzen rigging with the uncanny agility of which he was capable, and I climbed after him. We were some fifty feet above the deck when we saw clearly with the naked eye a vast purple canopy arching forward across the northern sky, a thing of splendidly colorful intensity, savagely beautiful. Jagged streaks of lightning flashed forth from its mirky depths. A tattered fringe of storm-clouds whipped out ahead of it like the tentacles of some monstrous sea-creature. And it advanced at an incredible speed, covering miles of sea and sky in the few moments that we watched it.

My great-uncle’s jaw squared grimly.

“’Tis too late to sacrifice the mizzen,” he said. “We’d not have time to clear the wreckage.”

His commands rang through the ship.

“Aloft, topmen! Strip her to a storm-jib! Hola, Coupeau! Double-lash your chase-guns and be certain the broadside batteries are secured and the ports closed. Batten all hatches, Saunders!”

’Twas as much as I could do to keep pace with him as he descended to the poop.

“Fetch a coil of light rope, Robert,” he ordered briefly. “We shall all require to be lashed fast.”

“Shall I carry Moira below?” I asked.

He hesitated.

“No, she will have a better chance----”

He checked himself.

“Let her bide on deck. Here we can aid her at need. Haste, boy! We must have the rope before the wind strikes us.”

I slid down a stay to the maindeck and dug the rope out of a chest of spare gear which was bolted to the cabin bulkhead. My great-uncle’s last words had impressed me even more than the spectacle of that baleful curtain across the northern sky; and I was thrilled, too, by the tense celerity with which the entire crew leaped to the task of preparing the ship to meet the tempest. There was almost no noise--a few shouts of command and hails of acknowledgment; but every man worked as if his life depended upon it. When the jib-sheet fouled Martin slashed it free with his knife, and the sail came down with a run. By the time I had regained the poop the upper spars already were bare.

Murray was standing with Moira and Peter beside the helmsman, and while they stared, fascinated, at the oncoming storm, his eyes were upon the _Walrus_.

“Flint must be sober,” he said bitterly. “He is taking in sail. Stap me, what a fit end to a luckless day! In the hollow of my hand, and now-- Aye, ’twould be all ways fitting did he escape, whilst we----”

A snarling moan, as of great winds tortured and confused, came to us from the belly of the storm. The sky darkened. A gust of air, sulfurous and warm, ruffled my hair. The moan became a howl, a clamor.

My great-uncle snatched the clasp-knife from the belt of the helmsman, a splay-footed Easterling, whose flat, gap-toothed face had remained impassive during all the excitement since Martin’s warning shout had announced the storm’s approach.

“Give me that rope, Robert,” he exclaimed. “I am a fool to stand talking. Here, Peter!”

He flung the Dutchman a length of it.

“Bind Mistress Moira to those ringbolts--and best knot her to yourself as well. She’ll not be able to stand alone. Aid me with this fellow here, Robert. We must tie him to the wheel.”

One of the clouds in advance of the storm curtain reached out over us with a crackle of lightning-bolts and spatter of rain, and our fingers flew as we secured first the helmsman and then ourselves. The voice of the tempest was become a sullen, animal roar, riven at intervals by the crash of the thunder. And the immense curtain of its front overhung the _James_, impenetrably sooty at the base, opaquely purple as it toppled forward. The _Walrus_ was a specter ship to leeward, and disappeared in the gloom as I watched.

“Oh, holy Mother!” gasped Moira. “’Twill be the end of all things.”

And so it seemed. The _Walrus_ was gone. The northern coast of the island dimmed and vanished. For an instant the peak of Foremast Hill hung in the upper air. Then that, too, was blotted out. The purple twilight deepened. Rain sheeted down from clouds scarce higher than our mast-heads. A lurid glare of lightning flickered and was quenched in the sea. And the wind smote us with a mad howl of exultation, sucking up into its embrace everything that was not fastened to the deck.

The _James_ shuddered under the blow, bearing down by the head and heeling to starboard. My great-uncle and I were pushed forward on our faces. The helmsman was doubled over the wheel. Peter bent to cover Moira, crouching above her on hands and knees.

Presently the ship righted herself; but as she neared an even keel there was a prolonged _craa-aa-ack!_ of breaking wood, and the wounded mizzenmast went by the board, crushing a score of men in its fall and brushing as many more through the hole it stove in the starboard bulwarks.

A wail of agony pierced thinly the tumult of the storm, and the _James_ was jarred from end to end as the big spar, with all its litter of yards and top-hamper, lunged at the hull like a trip-hammer, its dead weight dragging us broadside on into the path of the waves which followed the wind’s first irresistible rush. Steep walls of water dropped on us from as high as the mainyard, thudding hollow on poop and fo’csle. Giant combers crowded so fast that we choked beneath their deluge. The waist was a lather of creamy seas that wrenched and battered at hatchcoamings and bulwarks.

Murray staggered to his feet and set his lips to my ear.

“Must--cut--free--mizzen--breach--hull----”

So much I understood, and assisted him to slash the rope which bound us to the deck. Peter saw what we were up to and loosed himself, taking care in his deliberate fashion to strengthen Moira’s lashings. Then the three of us fought our way down into the hell-reek of the waist, where small boats and water-butts and dead men swirled fore and aft in a torrent of pounding seas.

There were axes in the box from which I had procured the rope, and we equipped ourselves with them, waded thigh deep through the tangle of water and wreckage and attacked the maze of stays and rigging that united the dangling mizzenmast to the ship. Not a man helped us. There was not a living man in sight aft of the mainmast, and it was as much as a man’s life was worth to try to work aft of that point, for on the one side there was a wide breach in the bulwarks through which the waves poured, and opposite was the gap the mizzenmast had crushed. Whoever crossed the deck there must have been carried overboard, one way or the other.

Where we were we had some slight shelter from the poop, but ’twas sufficiently hazardous in all conscience. I can see my great-uncle still, in his black silk coat and breeches, all adrip with the salt water as he labored with the energy of a man of half his age, always swift to perceive the strategic center of the tangle, always first to wade into the tricky web of cordage where a misstep meant a plunge overside.

Twice Peter rescued him from certain death, and once the Dutchman saved me when a mountainous sea curled down upon us over the _James’_ bulwarks and was like to have carried me off in its passing. And it was Peter whose brute strength and cool-headedness made the most of my great-uncle’s agility of wit, and hewed and hacked the mizzenmast from its moorings. Aye, and none too soon; for when we clambered back on the poop Moira met us with hands clasped in terror and pointed to leeward where a rocky headland loomed through the gray rain.

Murray gave it one look and leaped for the wheel. The Easterling was bent over in the odd, huddled posture he had assumed from the moment the storm hit us, and he lolled sidewise as my great-uncle grasped his shoulder, his body all askew from the small of his back upward. He made no response, and slipped lower in the coils of rope that bound him to his post; his gnarled fingers slid off the spokes; his feet went out from under him.

“His back is broken,” shouted my great-uncle.

The _James_ had begun to gather headway; but as the wheel was released from the dead helmsman’s grip her head fell off, and she dropped sluggishly into the trough of the seas which surged over the shattered waist, and one green hill of water burst squarely on the poop, hurling us to the deck. Peter recovered his footing before either Murray or I, shoved the Easterling’s body aside and gripped the wheel in his own hands. Slowly, the buoyancy all out of her, the _Royal James_ swung around in response to the rudder’s thrust and lumbered off before the wind.

The headland Moira had sighted faded into the mist; but my great-uncle shook his head sadly.

“We are making water,” he shouted to me; “and the island is to leeward. We scarce can weather it, and if we do----”

A faint hail reached us from the fo’csle.

“Land----”

And a rent in the storm-clouds showed a second and lower headland fair over our larboard bow.

Peter started to put the helm down to enable us to bear off as much as possible and have whatever chance there was of clearing it; but Murray caught his arm.

“No, no, Peter!” cried my great-uncle. “Head up! Head up! ’Tis the North Inlet! If we can pass in to sta’b’d of that spit we are safe.”

“_Ja_,” squeaked Peter, and his iron muscles forced the rudder over until it neutralized the drive of the wind and sea; and foot by foot the _Royal James_ made her southing, passed the east spit with half a cable’s length to spare and opened a narrow, bottle-shaped roadstead, with tree-clad shores that offered protection from any storm that blew.

The rain was still pelting down. The surf was foaming on the outer beaches; the wind whistled shrilly in the rigging. But to us that prospect was the fairest ever seen. Moira sank to her knees in prayer beside the dead pirate. My great-uncle stepped to the rail and bade the survivors of the crew get sufficient sail on the ship to give us steerage way. And I--I tried to shake Peter. He blinked at me solemnly.

“I t’ink _Gott_ spoke out loudt to der tdefil today, Bob,” he said. “_Ja_!”