The starboard boat, cluttered with men, provisions, and property and being rapidly rowed away from the danger centre, which was the Mary Turner, was scarcely a hundred yards away, when the whale, missing the schooner clean, turned at full speed and close range, churning the water, and all but collided with the boat.
It was when he was thus below that the cow grazed the schooner just for'ard of amidships on the port side, lashed out with her mighty tail as she sounded, and ripped clean away the chain plates and rail of the mizzen-shrouds.
The
schooner stopped at Santa Anna, and in the night Mauki swam ashore, where he stole two rifles and a case of tobacco from the trader and got away in a canoe to Cristoval.
He had become enigmatical and touching, in virtue of that mysterious cause that had driven him through the night and through the thunderstorm to the shelter of the
schooner's cuddy.
For an hour Long Jack walked his prey up and down, teaching, as he said, "things at the sea that ivry man must know, blind, dhrunk, or asleep." There is not much gear to a seventy-ton
schooner with a stump-foremast, but Long Jack had a gift of expression.
By this time the
schooner and her little consort were gliding pretty swiftly through the water; indeed, we had already fetched up level with the camp-fire.
Then I realized that I was in that little hell of mine again, now half swamped; and looking back over the gunwale, I saw the
schooner standing away from me, with the red-haired captain mocking at me over the taffrail, and turning towards the island saw the launch growing smaller as she approached the beach.
During the night, while the oyster pirates lay stupefied in their bunks, the
schooner and the Reindeer floated on the high water and swung about to their anchors.
And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains and falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the
schooner Ghost was fighting her way farther and farther into the heart of the Pacific--and I was on her.
She had felt entirely at ease in his society from the first evening that she had met him, and their acquaintance had grown to a very sensible friendship by the time of the departure of the Ithaca--the rechristened
schooner which was to carry them away to an unguessed fate.
The Merry Mist was my
schooner's name, and I had thought she was stoutly built until she hit that typhoon.
At any rate, the
schooner will take over the Jessie's business.