Donald Mckenzie celebrated two noteworthy events in Havana, Cuba. One was his twenty-first birthday, and the other was the successful completion of his first voyage as master of a vessel. She wasn’t a very big vessel—being but a fishing schooner of 99 tons—but still she was a vessel and required as much skill in sailing and navigating as a craft ten times her size. Judson Nickerson, in the brig Queen’s County, had arrived in Matanzas a couple of days before McKenzie attained his majority, and he journeyed the forty miles or so to Havana to help his friend celebrate the occasion.

McKenzie, a man grown, tall, lithe and sinewy, sea-tanned and good looking, and dressed in white ducks and a Panama hat, met his former skipper in the rotunda of the Hotel Sevilla. “Waal, by Jupiter!” cried Nickerson, wringing his hand. “You got daown here anyways, an’ you ain’t pushed any of th’ Bahamas off th’ charts in gittin’ here, have you? And you’re twenty-one, eh? Lord Harry, Donny-boy, you make me feel old—”

“Yes, you look old, you ancient crock!” laughed the other, staring at his friend critically. Judson had lost some of his ranginess, his angularities had filled out, and his sharp face had smoothed and rounded, until he looked younger than ever he did in Kelvinhaugh days. “Why you’re only a mere fifteen-year jump ahead of me, and since you’ve been living a quiet, settled life for the past four years, the lines of dissipation have faded—”

“The lines of starvation, you mean,” cried the other. “Since I left your hard-feeding Scotch ships an’ got home into Bluenosers again, I’ve gained weight, and so have you, let me tell you. Where do we celebrate?”

“Right here, old timer,” answered Donald. “I’ve got a meal ordered that will make your mouth water, and with everything to drink from pina frias to planter’s punch.” And they entered the cool, high-ceilinged dining room and sat down at a table by the patio.

“I suppose you’ll try to go afishin’ in that ol’ hooker of yours this spring,” queried Judson. “You should do all right. You know the ropes naow an’ ye’ve done two seasons in the dory with me. Will Heneker give you the Alameda for a fishin’ trip this spring, d’ye think?”

McKenzie pursed his lips. “I’m not sure, Jud. You see I offered to take her down here with a load of salt fish when Tom Himmelman took sick, as you know, and I didn’t get a chance to broach the subject. I was glad of the opportunity to skipper a vessel, and I didn’t ask for too much. But when I get home I’ll ask Heneker to give me a chance as skipper afishing, and if I take good care of the old Alameda he might give me charge of her or another of his hookers. Fishing is the only game to make money in. There isn’t much in this freighting work, but it’s a good way to pass the winter and earn a dollar or two. Do you know, you old fox, I think you had a hand in getting me this command?”

Captain Nickerson gave an enigmatical smile. “Skipper of a double-trawl dory is better than being mate of the finest wind-jammer afloat. You’re boss anyway—no matter the size. You ’member the old yarn ’bout the big P. and O. liner going out of London River? Her mate, brass-bound to the eyes, was standing in the bows when an old barge sculled across the river in front of the liner an’ th’ mate had to signal to the bridge to slow the engines to prevent a collision. Then he opens up on the bargee. ‘You blankety-blank scowbanker!’ he bawls. ‘What in Tophet d’ye mean by scullin’ yer old punt ’crost th’ bows of a liner carryin’ Her Majesty’s mails an’ a thousan’ passengers?’ The bargee shoots a squirt of tobacco juice over th’ liner’s stem as he sculls past, and he looks up at th’ brass-bound mate with all of a London bargee’s contempt for a deep waterman. ‘Oo th’ ’ell are you aboard that ’ooker?’ he shouts. ‘I’m the chief officer of this packet!’ answers the mate. Mister Bargee spits again and retorts, ‘Well, Mister Chief H’officer,’ he says, ‘I’m capting of this ’ere barge, so you’d better go’n talk to yer equals, you brass-bound bridge monkey!’”

The guffaws of the two sailors at this hoary old joke caused the tourists at adjacent tables to look questioningly in their direction.

Working through the dinner from soup to fruit, the two skippers passed a jovial couple of hours, and when the punch came along, Judson filled his glass. “Here’s to you, old son,” he said. “Twenty-one years of age an’ master of a vessel. Not too bad, boy! Not too bad! Here’s hoping that the next time I drink your health it will be at your wedding. Salut!” McKenzie acknowledged the toast with a smile. “And you, Jud? Here’s hoping I’ll have a similar pleasure, and I hope it will be soon. Bye-the-way, have you heard from Helena this time?”

The other reddened a little under his tan. “Yes, I got a note from her at Matanzas,” he said slowly, and then he added, “You know, we seafarin’ men are at a disadvantage. These pretty and popular girls have a swarm of shore-hawks dancin’ araound them all th’ time, while we poor devils only get an evening with them two or three times a year. Helena has a bunch of admirers in Halifax—there was two fellers visitin’ her the last time I went to call on her—an’ darned if I could get a word in edgewise. They gushed about hockey matches, dances, teas and theayters, an’ I had to sit an’ listen to their bunk an’ amuse myself tryin’ to figure aout th’ price of fish, until I sat the blighters aout an’ got a few minutes alone with her ’bout midnight. Durned if I know whether she likes me or not.”

Donald sighed sympathetically. His experiences were of a similar nature. He, too, had dallied precious hours waiting rare minutes of tÊte-À-tÊte with Ruth, but four years of persistent wooing seemed to have been rather futile, and he was in a state of maddening uncertainty as to his standing with the girl of his desire. He never talked to Judson about his fondness for Ruth, and the latter never mentioned the subject to him. Oftentimes he wished he could make a confidant of the brother, but as the other had never broached the subject, Donald hesitated to open it with him. From Jud, however, he got scraps of news, but they were not calculated to make him happy. “Th’ nut was daown home, I h’ard,” or “Ruth spent th’ holiday with th’ Moodeys,” was the general drift of his informative remarks and they made McKenzie writhe inwardly.

Ruth wrote him often, but they were merely friendly letters, commencing “Dear Donald,” and ending with “yours sincerely.” Donald took his cue from these, and no matter how much he hungered to subscribe himself as “yours affectionately,” or “yours lovingly,” he had to wait for time and opportunity to earn the right, and time and opportunity in a sailor’s wooing, is long acoming. Evidently Judson was in the same box, but Judson was in a better situation than McKenzie. Nickerson had money saved and could afford to keep a wife and a comfortable home; Donald had his mother to support and had nothing but a couple of hundred dollars to windward of him. Give him two years as skipper of a fishing vessel and he might, with luck, scratch up enough to keep a home with a wife and his mother, but when he thought of Ruth as the wife, the prospects looked black. Moodey paid her a great deal of attention; Moodey’s people had money, and he, himself, had secured his LL.B., and was now a junior member of his father’s law firm. Walter was away with a flying start on the road to success; McKenzie was but a common vessel fisherman, and skipper for a West Indian voyage, of a small schooner carrying dried fish.

They finished dinner and strolled down through the palms of the Prado to the Miramar on the Malecon or marine promenade. It was a glorious evening, and the cool sea breeze was coming in from the Gulf of Mexico with the setting of the sun, while a regimental band was playing for the entertainment of the Cubans and Americans who lounged around on the seats, or strolled leisurely along the sea-wall.

“Let’s sit down here and watch the sun set,” suggested Donald, leading the way to a seat. “My artistic eye is taken by the view from here. Isn’t it glorious? I must invest in a pad of paper and a box of water-colors and do some sketching. I’ve got a chance now.”

The sea stretched like a huge mirror of ruddy gold before them, and the sun was going down behind the placid Gulf a huge red ball already eclipsed by the horizon. The windows of the residences on the Malecon gleamed as though a furnace flamed within their walls, and the rocks of old Morro’s headland stood out like rough cast copper in the glow. The light-house tower, the ponderous masonry of Morro Fort and of Cabanas behind, stood placidly reflected in the fading light—calm and hoary as with the dignity of age, and when one gazed upon their rugged walls and heard the rag-time strains of the American band, a strange sense of incongruity took possession of the soul. Here, embodied in those massy bastions, was history—monumental testimony to the glory of old Spain, of the Conquistadores, of buccaneers and sea-rovers, of Columbus, Drake, Morgan and the hosts of reckless seafaring adventurers who had made these waters their cruising ground. From here, De Soto—the Bayard of Spanish chivalry—journeyed to Florida to seek a new El Dorado greater than Mexico or Peru, and left his noble wife, Isabella d’Avila, to hold La Fuerza as Regent of Cuba until his return. For five years she waited for her husband’s coming and kept the prowling sea wolves away from the treasures collected yearly in her stronghold for shipment to Spain. Then came the news of her husband’s death and burial in the turgid waters of the great river which he discovered—the Mississippi—and she surrendered her post to join him three days after the ill news was brought to her.

And in the brave days of old what sights old Morro saw! Slave-ships gliding in from the Guinea Coast, with the sea breeze behind and their ghastly freights below; privateers, adventurers, pirates and simple merchantmen! Plate ships from Panama with the treasures of the Incas in their holds, and galleons and carracks from Vera Cruz, with a lading of the silver of Mexico, slipped in and out of this storied harbor—Llave del Nuevo Mundo—as the Spaniards called it—“The Key to the New World!”

As he mused on these things, McKenzie thought of the prosaic age he lived in and the change wrought by the years. The dark and narrow streets with their grilled windows through which dusky senoritas in days long gone, watched the passers-by or flirted with caballero and hidalgo of Spain, were aglare with electric lights, and the streetcars gonged their noisy way down the stone-paved calles; the avenidas were thronged, not with promenaders in sombreros, black coats, and lace mantillas, but with smartly dressed men and women who spoke Spanish with an American accent, or English with a Spanish accent; with peddlers selling cheap cigars and cigarettes, and newsboys yelling “El Diario!” ... “El Mundo!” ... “Havana Post!” and “New York American!” and soliciting bilingually with easy transition from Spanish to English, and above the hum of conversation and street noises, blared the American band, playing, not the dreamy airs of far-off Castille, which Old Havana knew in thrumming guitars, but the latest Broadway “rag-time” or march of Sousa. And he, McKenzie, how had he come to storied Havana? Not in galleon, carrack, privateersman or slaver brig, but in a little Nova Scotia soft-wood schooner, with a load of dry salted cod-fish!

He sighed and came to a mental conclusion. Romance was in the past. It did not belong to the present; it was always in the past, and memory was like unto a skilful painter who touched up the drab canvases of reality with the colors of glamor long after the picture was made!

The sun had vanished behind the quiet sea and the stars had swarmed into the velvety azure of the firmament upon the heels of the master orb, whose after-glow still flamed above the western horizon. A fishing vessel crept in from the Keys on the breath of the soft north-east trade wind and her crew were chanteying an old Biscayan chorus, while a big steamer ablaze with lights forged out with passengers and cargo on schedule time, to connect with the trains at Key West, ninety miles away. Donald drank in the beauties of the night, and remarked to his companion, “This Cuba is a beautiful country, Jud, and I could sit for hours just dreaming and looking on this sort of thing. Look at those palms with their feathery fronds; that sunset! Oh, to be a master painter or a poet that I might dilate upon the things I see!”

“Yes, it’s very fine,” grudgingly admitted Judson, “but I don’t know as it can beat daown home for scenery. These tropical countries have lots of color in them—the flowers are gaudy and the palms and herbage are very green, but look how coarse they are. Then again, these places are all hell-holes for heat. You sweat all the time, and you’re pestered with flies and bugs of every variety. No, siree, I prefer Nova Scotia. I’ve bin all over th’ world, and I think Eastville has them all skinned for looks an’ climate. When a mosquito bites you Down-east you don’t die of yellow jack like you used to in these ports. This here Havana, until the Yankees cleaned it and drained it, used to be a sailor’s grave-yard.” He paused and lit up a cigar. “Tell me, now that you’re twenty-one an’ skipper of a hooker, tell me, what you think of a seafaring life now? You came aboard that Kelvinhaugh full up to the back teeth with the romance and adventure of it, but have you found it? Do you really like the life?” And he looked quizzically at McKenzie through the cigar smoke.

The other stared for a while at the ruddy glow of the sunset to the westward, and answered slowly, “Have I found romance and adventure in a sea life? I’ll answer that in a peculiar way. On the Kelvinhaugh my ideals were shattered and I hated it all, and I was glad to run away from her in Vancouver. On the voyage to Halifax in the Starbuck I was indifferent. It was intensely monotonous and the adventurous spells were only occasional, like the time we ran the easting down the Horn. But, now, when I look back on these voyages, it gives me a thrill and I see the adventure and romance of them, but it is only by recollection, and not in the actual experience, that I appreciate these things. But in the fisheries, I have found the true and ever-present fascination of seafaring. We’re taking something out of the ocean in that game; we’re dodging the wind and weather with only one objective—that of getting fish. We don’t know what we’re going to get. It’s a gamble, pure and simple, but there is a glamor and hazard in wresting the spoils of the deep from the deep, which does not exist in the other branches of seafaring, where one is paid a wage to sail a vessel from one port to another and keep her in good condition while on the journey. In fishing, we are in closer intimacy with the ocean and all its moods. We brave it in small, but able vessels with men whom we work with as partners, and we work in it, rather than on it. We know it as the merchant seaman cannot know it, for we know the floor of the ocean, while the other seamen only see the surface. To them, the sea is a waste of salt water. To us it is an element which we regard as an opaque mass which hides that which we seek and we are forever penetrating its secrets. We know the currents below; we know the depth of water on our Banks; we know what the bottom is like—rocks, gravel, mud or sand, and we try to figure out the migrations of the fish which travel over these bottoms in the gloom of the light-defying fathoms. We lay our lines over the sea floor always hopefully and we’re always looking forward to a catch. When the fish are striking it is dollars in our pockets and we’re robbing old ocean’s horde; when they’re not striking, we look forward optimistically to another day’s looting. Monotony, the drawback in seafaring, has thus no place in fishing. We are keener observers of the weather and thus become closer students of natural phenomena; we work hard, but we live well and sleep in comfortable quarters; we sail in craft of yacht-like build, and we enjoy the sport of sailing as no yachtsman can; and best of all, we are free and independent men banded together for a common purpose and obeying our leader without force or coercion. Seafaring under those conditions appeals to me. I am content. I desire no other vocation for gaining a livelihood, for it gives me money for my material needs, and enough of adventure, romance and the element of chance to satisfy my mind and soul. So there you have it.”

Nickerson smiled. “You’ve expressed it pretty well,” he remarked, “and I cal’late you’ve recorded my ideas on the subject also. We fishermen are the true Sea Kings. Your merchantman is only a ship laborer—nothing more and nothing less. I learnt that, and I went back to the fishing. The merchant seaman looks upon us with contempt; the landsman, with pity for our hard lot, and we laugh at the both of them. They are fools! They don’t know—they can’t know, for we are a fraternity—a lodge intricate and hard for the stranger to enter, for our initiation is difficult and not easily acquired. We are the finest sailors afloat, and we harvest Neptune’s pastures when his watch-dog, Boreas, sleeps. When we want a change, we come droghing fish and deals to the Indies or the Brazils and live in perpetual summer.”

Donald laughed. “Judson, you are developing a wonderful faculty for moralizing. I like your phrase ‘we harvest Neptune’s pastures when his watch-dog Boreas sleeps!’ That’s a motto for a fisherman. It should be painted on the wheel-box like the ‘Don’t give up the ship’s’ and ‘England expects,’ which they carve in the poop-breaks of British and American men-o-war.”

McKenzie accompanied his old ship-mate to the station, where he took train for Matanzas again. “So long, Donny-boy,” cried Judson as they pulled out. “I’ll see you in Eastville unless our courses cross. I’m loading molasses an’ I’ll be getting away in a day or so. I’ll tell your mother I saw you here an’ helped you to celebrate your twenty-first birthday—”

“You’ll tell my mother will you?” shouted the other with a grin. “Not if the Alameda has a rag of canvas on her. I’ll be home a fortnight before your old square-rig hooker sights Cape Sable.”

Early next morning the Alameda slipped out of Havana and ran south-east down the Cuban coast to the Turks or Caicos Islands—there to load a cargo of salt for fishery use. At Salt Cay, they came to an anchor and filled up the schooner’s hold with a cargo of the evaporated sea-water salt, which is the principal manufacture of the inhabitants of these easterly atolls of the Bahama group. When a full lading of the saline crystals was secured, the crew of six hands hoisted sails and anchor and with the steady trades filling their canvas they bowled off for Eastville and home.

“I’d like to make a fast run up,” said McKenzie to McGlashan. “It has been done in seven days, but I don’t think this old hooker can stand the driving and travel like those new model Lunenburg vessels. However, we’ll try her.”

With the Bahama current behind them and the steady north-east trade blowing strong, the Alameda showed her heels and ploughed through the deep blue of the tropical sea at a ten-knot clip. McKenzie paced the quarter, luxuriating in the bright sunshine and watching the flying-fish, which every now and again skittered up from the sapphire water as the on-rushing schooner drove upon them. Blue skies and bluer seas; water that boiled and hissed like champagne in the furrows of the vessel’s passage, and foam that gleamed snow-white against the deep colors of the Main; flashes of low sandy islets with graceful tufted palms leaning to loo’ard as the constant trade wind rudely swayed them.... Truly, these were enchanting seas! Little wonder, he mused, that the old sea-dogs of northern climes sought these waters and plied their nefarious occupations until Port Royal gallows and cruising frigates made the “trade” no longer safe or profitable. Aye, aye, no wonder the old buccaneer would lament the pleasant times in pleasant weather in—

For five days they ran thus and McKenzie lazied the hours away—reading and basking in genial sunshine and taking three sextant squints daily to fix the schooner’s position. Then they crossed the Gulf Stream and the chill breath of February struck them just as suddenly as the sea changed from blue to green at the fringes of the great current. Off came the light clothing of summer weather, and on went the heavy underwear, sweaters, sea-boots, mittens and caps of frigid seafaring, and a fire was kindled in the cabin stove to unlimber stiffened fingers and toes.

On February 20th, they made to the eastward of Brown’s Bank, and the fair wind which had hurried them along, flickered away and left them rolling, with slatting sails and banging booms, in a heavy swell from the S.E. The sky was solid with stratas of leaden cloud, which ran in layers from nadir to zenith, and the air was chill and cold. McKenzie studied the barometer anxiously—tapping the glass every reading to flog the forecasts of the instrument, which was steadily going down. Archie Surrette—an old fisherman—read the signs. “We’re agoin’ to git some dirt, Skipper,” he remarked. “Awful pink sunrise this mornin’ and there ain’t no gulls araound. This swell comin’ up from th’ south-east ... a south-easter, sure.”

McKenzie laughed. “That’s a fair wind for home, Archie,” he said. “Better get her snugged down though. Call the boys and we’ll get the jib in the tricing jacket and the mains’l reefed before it hits us.”

At noon, the glass had dropped to 29-5 and still going down. A misty rain began to fall, and within half an hour of its coming, the wind came in a squall from the southeast which drove the Alameda down to her rail with the violence of its initial onslaught. When it eased off and the schooner was tearing along towards the Nova Scotia coast, McKenzie ran below to squint at the barometer. “Dropped another tenth,” he muttered anxiously. He laid a chart out on the locker and with the dividers commenced measuring the distance from the vessel’s present position to the nearest harbor. For a minute he sat thinking, and then he rolled up the sea map and threw it into his bunk. “Can’t make it,” he muttered. “This blow will be on us full force within an hour, and we’d be safer offshore than running in on the land in a gale of wind and snow.”

Buttoning up his oilskins, he pulled on his mittens and went on deck. Though it was shortly after noon, the sky was dark and the rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind was blowing in gusts which careened the vessel to her rails as they struck the canvas.

Taking the wheel, he spoke to the helmsman. “Go for’ard Jim, an’ call the boys. Tell the cook to oil up and come on deck. We’ll get the mains’l off her.” And the man scrambled forward to do his bidding with feelings of relief. When the big mainsail is down, fishermen feel that they are in trim for anything.

Taking in the mainsail with a full gang of fishermen, and taking it in, in squally winter weather, with only six men to subdue the thrashing canvas, are two different propositions. When the men mustered aft, McKenzie gave his orders. “Joak will lower away on the peak, and Jim will lower away the throat when I sing out. You, Archie, will ship the crotch and hook in the tackles when Wesley lowers away on the topping lift. Ainslie will stand by the gaff down-haul, and I’ll look after the wheel. We’ll get the mainsheet in first. Are you ready?”

It was blowing harder every minute, and the schooner, by the wind, was plunging and rearing in an ugly cross sea kicked up by the shifting of the squalls to the eastward. The rain was turning into sleet, which cut the skin and numbed the hands with its bitterness and velocity, and which adhered to the gear and froze in the lowering temperature. Donald watched his chance, and in the wake of a violent blast, he rolled the wheel down easily and roared, “Helm’s a lee! Mainsheet!” For five minutes, the Alameda’s quarter was a scene of frenzied action. As the vessel came up, the mainsheet was yanked in by all hands, and then the men ran to the stations. As the schooner rounded into the wind, sails slatting and sheet blocks banging and jangling, McKenzie slipped the wheel in the becket, and held the crotch plank while Surrette hooked the crotch tackle into the ring bolts and hove it taut. The big sixty-foot boom was now amidships, and when it steadied above the crotch, McKenzie roared, “Lower away y’r lift!” And when Wesley Sanders slacked off on the tackle fall, the boom dropped on to the crotch notch; port and starboard crotch tackles already hooked in were hauled taut and belayed, and the order came, “Settle away yer halliards!”

The schooner, plunging and rearing, bows-on to the seas, was threatening to fall off with the wind in foresail and jumbo. “Let yer halliards go by the run!” shouted the skipper, springing to assist the two men tugging at the gaff-downhaul. “And bear a hand here you other fellows!” Joak and Jim at the pin-rail let the halliards go and scrambled aft to lend their strength and beef at the downhaul—wrenching and jerking with the vicious slats of the bellying mainsail, which, half way down the mast, was prevented from coming down further by the wind which filled the canvas.

As all hands struggled with the hauling down rope, a big sea rose above the quarter, roaring with a white-capped crest and curling ready to break. McKenzie saw it. “Belay yer downhaul,” he yelled, “and hang on!” The words were hardly out of his mouth before it broke aboard. The schooner rolled down to its impact, and the men hanging on to the downhaul were enveloped in solid green and washed over the main-boom and into the belly of the mainsail, which, with the force and weight of the water in it, was driven over the low rail and into the sea. Struggling for foot-hold on the slippery canvas and totally submerged in water as the schooner rolled to leeward, McKenzie and the four men with him would have been drowned had not Surrette, who had hung on to the crotch-tackles when the sea struck, jumped up on the cabin house and thrown a rope down to the yelling, oilskinned humans struggling and clawing to get out of the deadly water-filled sail.

As soon as he recovered his breath, McKenzie, with no time to thank Providence for his escape, or to contemplate the horrors of those suffocating minutes over-side, sprung to the wheel and swung the vessel off before the wind. “Get the fore-boom tackle hooked in,” he gasped. “I’ll jibe her and get that mains’l inboard!” As he rolled the wheel over, the Alameda slowly payed off. “Watch yerselves when she comes-to!” he cried in warning, and he stared anxiously at the little knot of men standing amidships by the fore-sheet. The wind was blowing with gale force by now and the sea was running in roaring combers, and the air was white with spray and sleet. For a minute the schooner raced over the waves with the wind aft, and on the declivity of a huge crest, Donald rolled the helm up and the foresail came sweeping over like the flick of a whip—fetching up on the jibing-tackle with such force as to snap the strong iron shackle of the block and to bend the stout boom like a bow. The fore-sheet held, however, and as the schooner came to the wind on the other tack, the men leaped into the main-rigging just as another sea boarded her amidships, and wrenching the staysail-box from off the booby-hatch, carried it over the rail.

McKenzie gave a grim smile. “Heneker won’t be pleased with this day’s work,” he murmured. “And this is only the beginning.” By this time, the mainsail had collapsed and the men were down from the rigging and tugging on the wet canvas. “Ef that there downhaul had parted while you fellers were in the belly o’ that mains’l overside, I cal’late ye’d ha’ bin in Heaven ’r Hell by this time!” observed Surrette. And the others grinned and thought no more about it.

Hove-to under foresail and jumbo and with the wheel lashed, McKenzie and his five men tugged and hauled the heavy wet mainsail aboard. Then commenced the big job of furling it—a herculean task, at which every man had to exert all the strength that was in him to roll the sodden, frozen canvas up and on to the boom. As he pulled and jerked and hefted the weighty roll of canvas on his back in order that the stops could be passed, Donald thought of similar tasks “down under” off the pitch of the Horn in the Kelvinhaugh. No need to go to fifty-five south for strenuous seafaring, he thought. It could be experienced in all its terrors right off the Nova Scotia coast in wintertime, and this was a sample of it.

It took them an hour to get the mainsail stowed, and when it was done, Joak staggered away to his galley—cursing the folly that made a cook a sailor. “A cook aye gets the worst of it,” he growled to himself. “They never want ye on deck but when it’s blawin’ a ruddy gale, and then ye get it butt-end first. I wisht I was back in a guid steamer’s galley whaur ye have nane o’ this murderin’ deck wurrk!” Joak was a true sea-cook, however, and in spite of the awful rolling and tumbling of the vessel, he had his oilskins off, his apron on, and good meal under way—gale or no gale. And the chilled and hungry humans of the Alameda wolfed his hot concoctions and blessed him wholeheartedly.

Throughout the short winter afternoon, they rode the gale under foresail and jumbo, with the wheel lashed and two men on deck to keep a watch. The wind was steadily increasing, and blowing in such terrific squalls from the N.N.E. that the schooner would be pressed lee-rail under during their violence. At tea-time, they stowed the jumbo to make the vessel lie easier, and McKenzie noted by the still falling barometer that the worst was yet to come.

With the darkness came conditions bad enough to frighten capable seamen. A terrible sea—stupendous in the height of the waves and the whitewater which crowned them—raced roaring through the livid night and tossed the schooner about like a cork. The wind, at times, blew in such terrific squalls as to heel the vessel down until half her deck was submerged and the watch had to hang, limpetlike, to the gear to avoid being blown overboard. Nothing born of woman could look to windward in those blasts, and the air was so full of spray as to fill the mouth with salt saliva in the breathing of it. The side-lights could not be kept alight, and a kerosene torch, which they had lit and placed inside a dory to shine against the foresail, was repeatedly doused by the sprays which drenched the schooner. “You’ll just have to keep torches handy inside the cabin gang-way to show a light in case another vessel’s bearing down,” said Donald, after an attempt to keep a riding-light lit on the peak halliards failed. Lightless, they plunged and rolled and prayed that the Alameda would cross no liner’s path that night.

At midnight the glass was down to 28.6 and pumping in rapid jerks, and McKenzie called Surrette’s attention to it. “Did you ever see that before, Archie?” he asked, hanging on to a weather bunk partition to save himself from sliding to leeward. The fisherman stared at the barometer, bit off a chew, and grinned. “Look’s if th’ gaul-derned thing was agoin’ to jibe, Skipper!” he remarked, and Donald laughed at the simile. The quivering of the needle suggested the premonitory symptoms of a sail about to swing over. He sat down on the cabin floor—it was impossible to stand or sit comfortably—and filled a pipe of tobacco. He had just taken a couple of puffs when the cabin slide was shoved back and Wesley shouted, “Gittin’ worse, Skipper, and snow’s thicker’n ever. Thought I h’ard a steamer blowin’—”

McKenzie was on his feet and up the steps in a trice. Clutching the spokes of the lashed wheel he listened with straining ears, and amidst the howl of the wind and the thunder of the sea he heard a regular note which betokened the blast of a steamer’s whistle. “Call the crowd, Wesley, and tell Jim to light the torches in the gangway—” He had barely shouted the words when the faint mast-head light of a large steamer blinked in the blackness to windward. A flicker of red and green showed below and McKenzie knew that the vessel was heading right square for them. Casting off the wheel lashing, he almost screamed, “Stand by yer fore-sheet! We’ll have to swing off!”

With fearful recollections of the Livadia accident in his mind, he watched the nearing lights and spoked the wheel over. Someone was easing off the sheet of the foresail and the vessel was swinging off. Then she gathered way and slipped out from under the roaring bows of the monster driving through the night. It was a big ship—a liner of ten or fifteen thousand tons—and she towered above them as she forged past, bellowing stentorously and rolling ponderously. The black smoke from her belching funnels whirled pungent and bituminous to McKenzie’s nostrils as she vanished into the blackness—a memory of rows of blazing port-holes and swinging fabric.

The Alameda tore through the dark with a huge wave chasing her astern, and waiting but a faltering hand at the wheel to overwhelm and destroy the gallant little craft. McKenzie was a master helmsman, however, and when the steamer passed, he shouted to Surrette beside him, “We’ll come-to again. Go for’ad and tell the boys to sheet in the fores’l when I put the wheel down!” Watching his chance in a smooth between two seas, he gave a shout and eased the spokes over while the crew amidships tugged the boom inboard and belayed. The steamer was but an incident—a common hazard nevertheless on the Banks—and they were hove-to once more.