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"If he cannot trust us, we two must teach him mustn't we, Gjert?" Towards dinner-time Salvé and Nils Buvaagen were standing for a moment together by the ship's side. The storm had perceptibly lulled, but the weather was still dull and hazy, and the sea high.
But when Nils Buvaagen declared himself a supporter of the captain's plan by crossing over the deck to him, all the others followed. Salvé went himself to the wheel, and gave the order to "Ease off the sheet." "Ease it is," was the answer; and that was the last order ever given on board the Apollo. Running now before the wind, they rapidly approached the land.
Nils Buvaagen came to his assistance, and Elizabeth, in intense anxiety, watched the two men while they cut away rope after rope, holding on by the rigging all the time, the sea breaking over them, so that sometimes they were hardly visible through the drench of water. After one last stroke, which freed them from the mast, Salvé was by her side again.
Meeting dead water like that out in the open sea generally meant that something was going to happen. Nils Buvaagen, like all fjord peasants, had a strong leaning towards every kind of superstition; and in his many voyages across the North Sea, he had had more than one experience of the kind in question. He had sat quite silent so far.
The words were hardly out of his mouth when the vessel heeled over, and didn't right herself again. "Fore-topmast gone, captain; rigging hanging!" bawled Nils Buvaagen down the stair. Salvé turned to her for a moment with a face full of mute, crushing self-reproach, and sprang up on deck. "Keep her away, if she'll answer her helm!" he shouted to the man at the wheel. "To the axes, men!"
Nils Buvaagen was standing in moody silence, with another, at the wheel, and he could see by the light from the binnacle, which occasionally fell upon Salvé's face as he walked up and down near them to leeward, that he was ashy pale. He would have liked to say something, but it didn't seem advisable. "Topsail's flapping!" came from forward, "she'll be taken aback!"
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