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He had doubled round the bows of the yacht, and I did the same, ducked under the bowsprit, forgetting the bobstay, and fell violently on my head, with all the wind knocked out of me by a wire rope and block whose strength and bulk was one of the glories of the Dulcibella. I struggled on as soon as I got some breath, but my invisible quarry was far ahead.
"But if we don't know what time it is, we can't be tied to the bell-rope." "No use; the captain knows the boom from the bobstay, and if he isn't a Knight of the Golden Fleece, you can't pull wool over his eyes. You know he put McDougal through this morning." "Well, come along.
"I'd just time to put the helm down, hoping to scrape clear of her, when I heard a crash and saw her bowsprit come sweeping along over our deck, tearing away the luff of the mainsail and knocking the port quarter-boat to pieces. I thought I saw some one hanging on to her bobstay, and the next moment that or something else struck me on the head and shoulders, and I thought I was going overboard.
It was nearly half an hour before all was clear, and the last of the yachts in the race had passed them before the leeward sheet of the foresail was hauled aft, and the Phantom resumed her course. As soon as she did so, the captain came aft with part of the copper bar of the bobstay. "There has been foul play, sir," he said.
She was safe at sea again una de multis with a damaged foreyard, and a loss of all the ornamental work about her bow and stern, three anchors, one kedge-anchor, fourteen lengths of chain, four boats, the jib-boom, bobstay, and bands and fastenings of the bowsprit.
"What's the Talla-what-you-call-her?" demanded Christy. "She's the steamer you can see when the fog lifts," answered Captain Sullendine. "The Tallahatchie is her name. Are you a sailor, my lively lad?" "I reckon I know the bobstay from the mainmast."
Others were going, or had gone, to the source of the Arveiron, and to the Brevent, while the British peer, having previously been conducted by a new and needlessly difficult path to the top of Monte Rosa, was led off by his persecutor to attempt, by an impossible route, to scale the Matterhorn to reach the main-truck, as Captain Wopper put it, by going down the stern-post along the keel, over the bobstay, up the flyin' jib, across the foretopmast-stay, and up the maintop-gallant halyards.
"Any luck?" said Moorshed politely. "Not till we met yeou," was the answer. "The Lard he saved us from they big ships to be spitted by the little wan. Where be'e gwine tu with our fine new bobstay?" "Yah! You've had time to splice it by now," said Pyecroft with contempt. "Aie; but we'm all crushed to port like aigs. You was runnin' twenty-seven knots, us reckoned it. Didn't us, Albert?"
But my heart sank within me as I watched her, for the destruction of her sails, which I had at first thought a fortunate circumstance, inasmuch as she no longer blew away from us, I now recognised as a dreadful happening; for, stationary as she now lay on the water, the light draught of wind had full power to fan the fire that raged aboard her, and by the time that we drew up under her bows and hooked on to her bobstay, she was a roaring mass of flames from stem to stern.
Preparations were accordingly made to set the mainsail. The throat was hoisted nearly up; the peak was half hoisted; then the jib was bent on, and hauled out to the bowsprit end. "Come, Ernest, bowse away on the bobstay," cried Ellis. Ernest was for a moment at fault, but when he saw his friend hauling away on a rope forward, he took hold of it, and soon guessed its object.
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