Chapter XIII: A Taste of Ship's Discipline

For an hour or more passing events were as naught to Ralph. Too ill to sling his hammock, he finally crawled under one of the small boats on the main deck, and at last fell asleep.

The next thing he was conscious of was a terrible chill, a sensation of drowning, and gasping for breath. As he woke he heard a gruff voice say:

"If that don't fetch him nothin' won't."

As Ralph opened his eyes, several seamen were standing about, laughing, one of whom held a half emptied bucket of water.

The boy's head ached and he was thoroughly drenched and miserable.

"Up you get!" said Long Tom, pausing in his walk to and fro in the waist of the schooner, "Time you were gettin' breakfast on the cabin table. Cap'n always raises thunder when breakfast is late."

Ralph, on rising to his feet, nearly pitched down again, being brought up with a round turn in the lee scuppers.

"Easy now, and get 'e sea legs on," suggested Bludson, who was balancing himself dexterously in his walk.

The wind had stiffened, and a crisp plain of dancing white caps met Ralph's gaze as he steadied himself by the bulwarks. The Curlew, under a single reefed fore and mainsail and a single jib, was gracefully rising and falling to the rhythmic motion of long and ponderous waves.

The unaccustomed roll bewildered the lad from the mountains, the singing of the wind through the shrouds buzzed strangely in his ears. He made a dive for the cook's galley, where Neb was dishing up the cabin meal.

"Mind yo' steps, now," the negro cautioned him, as Ralph, with a waiter full of dishes, started for the companionway.

The boy, though wet and shivering, determined to do his duty, come what might. By the assistance of Long Tom, who seized him by the collar and propelled him roughly but safely across the deck, he managed to reach the cabin.

He got the table arranged somehow, placing the dishes in the rough weather racks provided, then after washing his face, he made his way back to the galley and started with another waiter full of eatables.

This time something had drawn Long Tom away. Ralph did very well until he came to the open space between one of the boats and the mainmast. A rope really should have been stretched amid deck for his aid, but as others did not need it, no one thought or cared for the cabin boy.

Just as Ralph made a dive for the mast and the afterhatch beyond, the captain emerged from the companionway. The boy reached the mast in safety. Encouraged by this, he loosened his hold and started boldly for the head of the stairs.

Unfortunately the stern of the Curlew sank suddenly under the influence of a receding wave of unusual proportions. Ralph and his waiter of dishes were thrown violently forward against Captain Gary, who stood like a rock, while the boy pitched one way and his dishes went another.

All who saw the catastrophe looked on with suspended breath.

The captain glared at Ralph as the lad picked himself up, then pointed to the wreck of his breakfast.

"Clean up that rubbish," he growled, a grimness as of death settling over his face.

Two sailors sprang forward with bucket and mop. The captain turned to Ralph, who could now trace little resemblance in his superior's face and mien to the bland, almost fatherly man who had welcomed him at the Marshall House.

"My lad," said Gary, and his voice grated harshly on the ear, "I don't think the deck agrees with you. Suppose you try the fo'mast head for an hour. Come! Up you go!"

In his bewilderment Ralph attempted to mount the mainmast ratlines in a lumbering way.

"Start him up, Long Tom," roared the captain. "The fool don't even know where the fo'mast is."

Bludson again seized Ralph by the collar, propelled him the length of the deck and gave him a long boost up the forward ratlines.

Faint from sickness, shivering in his wet clothes, dizzy with the peril of his position, yet with a rising passion in his heart, the boy began to ascend. With a shifting foundation under his feet, a stiff wind flattening him against the shrouds, and a deathly swaying to and fro that increased as he went higher, he managed to reach the foretop. Crawling through the lubber hole he rested and held on.

"Up with you!" shouted the captain, but Ralph gave no heed.

He was weak, faint and dizzy. The heaving plain below made his head swin [Transcriber's note: swim?]. The schooner's deck looked fearfully small.

Casting his eye upward, he saw a narrowing ladder of rope shooting to a mere dot of a resting place twenty feet above him. It did not look as if a monkey could have held on there.

"Why in the ---- don't you go on!" roared Gary, who was now pale with contained fury.

"I think the lad is sick, sir," said Duff, who happened to be near. "See--by heavens!--he has fainted."

"The kid is shamming," growled the first mate, whose watch it now was. "A dose of the paddle would bring him to, I'll warrant."

"I think you are right, Rucker," said Gary without paying any heed to the second mate. "Lay for'ard there two of you and lash him to the topmast shrouds. He shall have his hour up there, dead or alive, then we'll settle his shamming."

Two sailors, seizing some loose line, ran up the foremast to where Ralph had sunk back in a swoon, overcome by the combined effects of illness and the terrors of his position.

Lifting him to his feet, they bound him to the topmast ratlines so that his feet rested on the little platform. As they came down one said to the other:

"He ain't shamming. The lad is sick enough for a doctor, that's what 'e is, mate."

"Shet up," quoth his companion. "Let the captain hear you and he'll put you on bread and water for three days, if no worse comes. Every tub stands on its own bottom in this craft."

Meanwhile Neb had served breakfast in the cabin. Gary and Rucker went down, Duff taking the first mate's place.

This was the second mate's first voyage with Captain Gary, and he furtively sympathized with Ralph, but such is the force of discipline on shipboard that he dared not show his feelings openly.

"It's a burning shame," thought he, "to punish a land lubber of a boy the first day he ever spent at sea. Sugar wouldn't melt in Gary's mouth when I went to him for a job, but now the tune is changed. And to cap all, nobody seems to know where we're bound, unless it may be Rucker. The crew know nothing, except that we're provisioned for a long voyage, with a lot of stuff locked up in the hold as no one has seen yet."

He glanced up at the helpless boy, then shook his head.

"Hut tut! Are you sick of this cruise already, Jacob Duff? This will never do. You're in for it, so make the most of your luck, even if it turns out you do have a fiend for a skipper."

When Gary and his first officer returned, Duff went below. But as he ate, his thoughts reverted so persistently to Ralph's predicament that he grew impatient with himself. After finishing his meal he lay down in his berth and tried to sleep. Some time had elapsed when he was aroused by a sound of furious objurgation on deck.

He rose, took his cap and crept up the companionway. Captain Gary was standing by the weather rail of the quarter deck, where with clenched hands and violent gestures, he was pouring forth a flood of profane vituperation such as Duff had seldom heard equaled.

Before him was Ralph, still so weak as to require the support which Long Tom was roughly giving him, yet gazing on his infuriated commander with a steady unflinching scorn.

"Tell me you won't, eh?" stormed the captain, his feminine air and aspect completely lost in a mien of scowling ferocity. "By the living--but what's the use of swearing! Down with him to the sweat box, and if that don't tame him we'll try the paddle afterward.

"Captain Gary," interrupted Ralph undauntedly, "if I had known you yesterday as I know you now, I'd have seen you dead before I'd a been here today. I'm weak, I know; you may tie and starve me, but if you ever have me beaten--make it a good job."

Gary seemed momentarily paralyzed at such independence, then out of sheer amazement hissed forth sneeringly:

"Will your impudence tell me why?"

"Because I'll kill you!" exclaimed Ralph, with such concentrated energy of tone and accent, that Duff trembled inwardly for the boy's safety. "I know I'm in your power now, but I'd do it ten years from now if I had to wait so long. I never knew a mountain man to take a beating yet, without he got even--never!"

Such unheard of insolence appeared to deprive Gary of words wherewith to do the situation justice.

"You know what I want!" he roared at Bludson, as he left the deck. "See that it is done!"

The boatswain at once collared Ralph and took him forward, where both disappeared in the forecastle.

While this scene was being enacted, Rucker leaned against the stern rail idly picking his teeth, as his dull, hard eye glanced alternately from the vessel's course to the parties most concerned.

"What in heaven's name is it all about?" asked Duff, when the two men were alone but for the man at the wheel, who appeared to give no heed. "What has the boy done?"

"He's too independent," replied the first mate. "He can't do nothing; he couldn't even climb the fo'mast or walk the deck in a breeze. Such green uns has no business bein' independent aboard ship. If I was captain I'd a had him triced up to the mast and the paddle a going afore now."

"The lad never saw a ship till yesterday. Isn't it a little rough to expect him to find his sea legs in half an hour? He was seasick to boot."

"Sea--thunder! You never sailed with Captain Gary afore, did you?" Rucker regarded his junior with a peculiar smile. "I thought not. Well--I have. I'll give you a pointer. He'd rather send this ship to the bottom any time than stand any nonsense. That's him; and I'm sort o' built that way myself."

Duff made no response, and soon returned to his stateroom, where he remained until his own watch was called. He was a good sailor and a nervy sort of a man, but there was something so peculiarly devilish in the contrast presented by Gary's slight, feminine person and his abnormal exhibition of rage that the second mate began to doubt whether he had done wisely in shipping with an unknown captain on an unknown voyage for the sake of mere high wages.

He finally fell asleep until wakened by the sound of two bells being struck, followed by the hoarse cry of:

"Starb'd watch on deck, ahoy!"