The Sally came, abruptly, into a sea that was full of whales. At nightfall they had not smelled oil for weeks; at dawn there were spouts on three quarters of the horizon; and thereafter for more than a month there were never three successive days when they did not sight whales.

This turn of the luck brought three things to pass: Roy Kilcup had his first chance in the boats during the chase; Brander killed his first whale as an officer of the Sally; and Noll Wing killed the last cachalot that was ever to feel his lance.

Dan'l Tobey had promised Roy, at the time when Brander was promoted to be mate, that he would give the boy a chance in his boat. He put Roy on the after thwart, under his own eye, and Roy leaned to the oar and pulled with all his might, and bit his lip to hold back the sobbing of his breath. The boy came of whaling stock; his father and his father's father had been men of the sea. And he did not turn white when the boat's bow slid at last alongside a slumbering black mass, and the keen harpoons chocked home.

That first experience of Roy's was a mild one. The whale, a fairish bull, showed no fight whatever. He took the irons as a baby takes soothing sirup; and he lay still while they pulled alongside and prodded him with a lance. At the last, when his spout was a crimson fountain, he gave one gigantic forward leap; but he was dead not ten fathoms from the spot where he lay when the first harpoon went home; and thereafter there was only the long toil of towing the monster back to the ship for the cutting in.

A small affair, without excitement; yet big for Roy. It worked a change in the boy. He came back to the ship no longer a boy, but the makings of a man. He spoke loftily to Faith; and he brushed shoulders with the men on equal terms and was proud to do so, altogether forgetting the days when he had liked to think himself their superior, and to order them around. Dan'l catered to the new mood in the boy; he told Cap'n Wing in Roy's hearing that the youngster would make a whaleman.... That he had never seen any one so cool at the striking of his first whale.... Roy swelled visibly.

Brander's initiation as an officer of the Sally came at the same time; and a bit of luck made it possible for the fourth mate to prove his mettle. When they sighted spouts in three quarters, that morning, the mate had chosen to go after a lone bull; old Tichel and Brander attacked a small pod to the eastward; and Willis Cox went north to try for a fish there.

Brander gave Tichel right of way, since the old man was his superior officer; and they came upon the pod with a matter of seconds to choose between them. The whales were disappointingly small; nevertheless Tichel attacked the largest, and Brander took the one that fell to him. His irons went home a moment after Tichel's; his whale leaped into the first blind struggle, not fleeing, but fighting to shake off the iron.

Now it is customary, among whalemen, to wait till this first flurry has passed, to allow the whale to run out his own strength, and then to pull in for the finishing stroke. But Brander was ambitious; the whale was small.... He changed places with Loum, and shouted orders to his men to haul in the loose coils of line that had been thrown over with the irons. The whale was circling, rolling, striking with its flukes; it had not seen them, gave them no heed, but the very blindness of its struggles made them a greater menace.

They drew in on the whale; and Loum at the steering oar swung Brander against the monster's flank. Brander got home his lance in three thrusts before they were forced to draw clear to avoid the whale's renewed struggles. But those three were enough; the spout crimsoned; he loosed and backed away from the final flurry, and the whale was dead ten minutes from the time when the first iron went home.

That was exploit enough to prove Brander's ability; his quick kill marked him as a man who knew his job. He could have afforded to be content; but when his whale was fin out, and he looked around, he was in time to see trouble come upon James Tichel.

The whale Tichel struck had sounded; and just after Brander killed, it breached before his eyes, under the very bows of Tichel's boat. Brander saw the black column of its body rise up and up from the sea; it seemed to ascend endlessly.... Then toppled, and slowly fell, and struck the water so resoundingly that for a moment the whale and Tichel's boat were hidden alike. Tichel was dodging desperately to get clear; but the wallowing whale rolled toward him, over him, smothering his craft.... Brander, when the tossing and tormented water quieted, saw the bobbing heads of the men, and the boat just awash, and the gear floating all around....

The whale showed no immediate disposition to run; it was rolling in a frenzy, bending double as though to tear at its own wounds.... Brander stuck a marking waif in his own whale, drove his men to their oars, cut across to see that Tichel and the others were kept afloat by the boat, and then managed to pick up one of the floating tubs of line, to which the whale was still attached. The rest was easy enough; the whale fought its strength away, and Brander made his kill.

Willis Cox had failed to get fast; the whales he sought to attack took fright as he approached them, and his game got away with a white slash across the blubber where Long Jim's desperate cast of the harpoon had gone wild. So Willis rowed to join Brander, and picked up Tichel and his men, and took their boat and Tichel's whale which Brander had killed, in tow. Brander took the other; they worked back to the Sally. When they got back to the ship, Noll Wing clapped Brander on the shoulder and applauded him. The excitement of the sudden chase, after the weeks of idling, had put life into Noll. His cheeks were flushed; his eyes were shining; he had the look of his old self once more....

Two whales at a time is as much as any whaler cares to handle; the Sally had three. A blow of any violence would have made it impossible for them to cut in even one of the carcasses before the steady heat of the southern seas rendered them unfit; but no squall came. The luck of the Sally had turned, and turned in earnest. The men welcomed the hard work after their long idleness; they toiled at the windlass and the gangway with the heartiest will. They raised chants as they walked the blanket pieces up to the main head or slacked them down the deck to be cut and stowed in the blubber room below the main hatch. The intoxication of the toil took possession of them; they went at it singing and exultant and afire; and even Noll caught the spirit of the day from them. Youth flooded back into the man; his shoulders straightened; his chest seemed to swell before their eyes. Faith, watching him, thought he was like the man she had loved.... She was, for a time, very happy....

The fever of it got into Noll's blood; and when they killed another whale the third day after, he swore that at the next chance he would himself lower for the chase. He fed on the thought.... Faith, fearful for him, ventured to protest; her first thought was ever that on Noll's safety depended the safety of the Sally, that Noll's first duty was to bring the Sally Sims safely home again. She told Noll this; told him his place was with the ship.

"The Sally is your charge," she said. "You ought not to risk yourself.... Take chances...."

He laughed at her tempestuously. "By God," he cried, "I was never a man to send men where I was afeared to go. So let be, Faith. You coddle me like a child; and I am not a child at all. Let be."

Faith surrendered helplessly; but she hoped he would forget, would not keep his word. He might have forgotten as she hoped; he was sinking back into his old lassitude when the masthead men sighted the next whale; but Dan'l sought Noll out and said anxiously:

"Best think better of it, sir. This looks like a big whale; a hard customer."

Noll had so nearly forgotten that he asked: "Think better of what, man?"

Dan'l smiled, as though he were pleased. "I thought you meant to lower," he said. "You do well to change your mind. Stay aboard here; leave us to handle him."

Which was like a goad to Noll, as Dan'l must have known it would be. The captain laughed angrily, and thrust Dan'l aside, and took the mate's own boat with Roy on the after thwart, and lowered. Faith was anxious; she found chance to say to Brander, as the other boats were striking the water: "Look after him, Mr. Brander." And Brander nodded reassuringly.

Dan'l climbed into the rigging to watch the battle; he scarce took his glass from his eye. What he hoped for, whether he thought chance and the whale might wipe Noll from his path, only Dan'l knew.

This whale, as it chanced, was sighted at early morning; and this was as well. A big bull, the creature lay quietly, just awash, while the captain's boat came upon it from behind. He stirred not at all till Noll Wing swung hard on the long steering oar and brought them in against the black side and bellowed to Silva:

"Let go! Let go the irons!"

Silva knew his work as well as any man; and he got both harpoons home to the hitches, and threw the line clear as the bull leaped bodily forward and upward, half out of the water, and whirled in a smothering turmoil of spray and tortured foam to escape the blades that bit him. Noll swung them out of his way, shouted to Silva:

"Aft, now! Let me be at him, man...."

And Silva came stumbling back across the thwarts to take the steering oar, while Noll went forward and chose his lance and braced himself in the bow.

The whale, his first torment dulled, had stopped his struggle and lay still, swinging slowly around in the water. It was as though he looked about to discover what it was that had attacked him; and old Tichel—the other boats were standing by in a half circle about Noll and the whale—bawled across the water:

"'Ware, sir. He's looking for you."

Noll heard and waved his hand defiantly; and at the same time, the whale saw Noll's boat and charged it.

The whale, as has been said, would be invulnerable if his wit but matched his bulk. It does not. Furthermore, the average whale will not fight at all, but runs; and it is his efforts to escape that blindly cause the damage, and even the tragedies of the fisheries. But when he does attack, he attacks almost always in the same way. The sperm whale, the cachalot, trusts to his jaw; he bites; and his enemy is not the men in the boat, but the boat itself. Perhaps he cannot see the men; his eye is small and set far back on either side of his great head. Certainly, when once a boat is smashed, it is rare for a whale to deliberately try to destroy the men in the water. The sperm whale tries to bite; the right whale—it is from him your whalebone comes—strikes with his vast flukes. He will lie quietly in the water and brush his flukes back and forth across the surface, feeling for his enemy. If his flukes touch a floating tub, an oar, a man, they coil up like an enormous spring, and slap down with a blow that crushes utterly whatever they may strike. The whalemen have a proverb: "'Ware the sperm whale's jaw, and the right whale's flukes." And there is more truth than poetry in that.

When a sperm whale destroys a boat with his flukes, it is probably accident; but he bites with malice prepense and pernicious. The whale which Noll had struck set out to catch Noll's boat and smash it in his jaws.

His very eagerness was, for a long time, his destruction. The whale was bulky; a full hundred feet long, and accordingly unwieldy. A man on foot can, if he be sufficiently quick, dodge a bull in an open field; by the same token, a thirty-foot whaleboat, flat-bottomed, answering like magic to the very thought of the men who handle her, can dodge a hundred-barrel bull whale. Noll's boat dodged; the men used their oars at Noll's command, and Silva in the stern swung her around as on a pivot with a single sweep. The whale surged past, the water boiling away from its huge head.

Surged past, and turned to charge again.... This time, as it passed, Noll touched the creature with his lance, but the prick of it was no more than the dart in the neck of a fighting bull. It goaded the whale, and nothing more. He charged with fury; his very fury was their safety.

Noll struck the whale at a little after nine o'clock in the morning. At noon, the vast beast was still fighting, with no sign of weariness. It charged back and forth, back and forth; and the men swung the boat out of his way; and their muscles strained, their teeth ground together, the sweat poured from them with their efforts. They were intoxicated with the battle. Noll, in the bow, bellowed and shouted his defiance; the men yelled at every stroke; they shook their fists at the whale as he raged past them. And Silva, astern, snatching them again and again from the jaws of destruction, grinned between tight lips, and plied his oar, and cried to Noll to strike.

At a little after noon, the whale swung past Noll with such momentum that he was carried out to the rim of the circle in which the fight was staged, and saw Tichel's boat there. Any boat was fair game to the monster; and Tichel had grown careless with watching the breath-taking struggle. He had forgotten his own peril; he expected the whale to turn back on Noll again....

It did not; it swung for him, and its jaws sheared through the very waist of his boat, so that the two halves fell away on either side of the vast head. The men had time to jump clear; there was no man hurt—save for the strangling of the salt water—and the whale seemed to feel himself the victor, for he lay still as though to rest upon his laurels.

Willis Cox was nearest; he drove his boat that way, and stood in the bow, with lance in hand to strike. But Noll, hauling up desperately on the line, bellowed to him: "Let be, Willis. He's mine." And Willis sheered off.

Then the whale felt the tug of the line, and whirled once more to the battle. Willis picked up Tichel and his men, towed the halves of the boat away, back to the ship.... The Sally was standing by, a mile from the battle. Such whales as this could sink the Sally herself with a battering blow in the flank. It was dangerous to come too near. Willis put Tichel and his men aboard, and went back to wait and be ready to answer any command from Noll.

The fifth hour of the battle was beginning.... The whale was tireless; and Noll, in the bow of his boat, seemed as untired as the beast he fought. But his men, even Silva, were wearying behind him. It was this weariness that presently gave the whale his chance. He charged, and Silva's thrust on the long oar was a shade too late. The boat slipped out of reach of the crashing jaws; but the driving flukes caught it and it was overturned. The gear flew out....

Noll, in the bow, clung to the gunwale for an instant as the boat was overthrown. Long enough to wrench out the pin that held the line in the boat's bow. Silva, astern, would have cut; his hatchet was ready. But Noll shouted: "No, by God! Let be...."

Then they were all in the water, tumbling in the surges thrown back by the passage of the monster.... And the whale drove by, turned, saw no boat upon the water, thought victory was come....

Brander, at this time, was a quarter-mile away. When the boat went over, he yelled to his men: "Pull.... Oh, pull!" And they bent their stout oars with the first hot tug; fresh men, untired, hungry these hours past for a chance at the battle. Brander started toward where lay the capsized boat, the swimming men....

And Noll Wing lifted a commanding arm and beckoned him to make all speed. Brander urged his men: "Spring hard! Spring.... Hard. Now, on!"

A whaleboat is as speedy as any craft short of a racing shell; and Brander's men knew their work. They cut across the vision of the loafing whale; and the beast turned upon this new attacker with undiminished vigor.

Brander's eyes narrowed as he judged their distance from the drifting boat; he swerved a little to meet the coming whale head on. The whale plowed at him; they met fifty yards to one side of the spot where the boat was floating; and as they met, Brander dodged past the whale's very jaw, and slid astern of him. Before the whale could turn, he was alongside the capsized boat, dragging Noll over his own gunwale.

He dragged Noll in; and he saw then that the captain held in his hand a loop of the line that was fast to the whale. And Brander grinned with delighted appreciation. Noll straightened, brushed Brander back out of the way without regarding him, passed the line to the men in Brander's boat. "Haul in," he roared. "Get that stowed aboard here. By God, we'll get that whale...."

They worked like mad, coiling the slack line in the waist, while Noll fitted it into the crotch and pinned it there. The whale was back at them, by then; they dodged again. And this time, as the creature swung past, Loum—Brander's boat-steerer—brought them in close against the monster's flank before dodging out to evade the smashing flukes. In that instant, Noll saw his chance, and drove home his lance to half its length.

It was the first fair wound the whale had taken; a wound not fatal, not even serious. Nevertheless, it seemed to take the fight out of the beast. He sulked for a moment, then began—for the first time in more than five hours' fighting—to run.

The line whipped out through the crotch in the bow; the men tailed on to it, and let it go as slowly as might be, while Loum swung the steering oar to keep them in the creature's track. Noll, in the bow, was like a man glorified; his cap was tugged tight about his head; he had flung away his coat, and his shirt was open half way to the waist. The spray lashed him; his wet garments clung to his great torso. His right hand held the lance, point upward, butt in the bottom of the boat; his left rested on the line that quivered to the tugging of the whale. His knee was braced on the bow.... A heroic figure, a figure of strength magnificent, he was like a statue as the whaleboat sliced the waves; and his lips smiled, and his eyes were keen and grim. The line slipped out through the burning fingers of the men; the whale raced on.

Abruptly Noll snapped over his shoulder: "Haul in, Mr. Brander," And Brander, at Noll's back, gave the word to the men; and they began to take back the line they had given the whale in the beginning. It came in slowly, stubbornly.... But it came. They drew up on the whale that fled before them. They drew up till the smashing strokes of the flukes as the creature swam no more than cleared their bow. Drew up there, and sheered out under the thrust of Loum's long oar, and still drew on.... They were abreast of the flukes; they swung in ahead of them.... They slid, suddenly, against the whale's very side.

The end came with curious abruptness. The whale, at the touch of the boat against his side, rolled a little away from them so that his belly was half exposed. The "life" of a whale, that mass of centering blood vessels which the lance must find, lies low. Noll knew where it lay; and as the whale thus rolled, he saw his mark.... He drove the lean lance hard; drove it so hard there was no time to pull it out for a second thrust. Nor any need. It was snatched from his hands as the whale rolled back toward them. Loum's oar swung; they loosed line and shot away at a tangent to the whale's course. And Noll cried exultantly, hands flung high: "Let me, let me, be. He's done!"

They saw, within a matter of seconds, that he was right. The whale stopped; he slowly turned; he lay quiet for an instant as though counting his hurts. The misty white of his spout was reddened by a crimson tint; it became a crimson flood. It roared out of the spout hole, driven by the monster's panting breath.... And the whale turned slowly on his side a little, began to swim.

A tiny trout, hooked through the head and thrown back into the pool, will sometimes race in desperate circles, battering helplessly against the bank, the bottom of the pool, the sunken logs.... Thus this monstrous creature now swam; a circle that centered about the boat where Noll and the others watched; that tore the water and flung it in on them. Faster and faster, till it seemed his great heart must burst with his own labors. And at the end, flung half clear of the water, threw his vast bulk forward, surged idly ahead, slowly.... Was still.

Noll cried: "Fin out, by God. He's dead...."

A big whale, as big as most whalemen ever see, the biggest Noll himself had ever slain. A fitting thing; for old Noll Wing had driven his last lance. He was tired; he showed it when Brander gave the whale to Willis for towing back to the ship, and raced for the Sally with Noll panting in the bow. The fire was dying in the captain's eyes; he pulled Brander's coat about his great shoulders and huddled into it. He scarce moved when they reached the Sally. Brander helped him aboard. Dan'l Tobey cried: "A great fight, sir. Six hours; and two stove boats.... But you killed."

Noll wagged his old head, looked around for Faith, leaned heavily upon her arm.

"Take me down, Faith," he said. "Take me down. For I am very tired."