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Updated: May 25, 2025
In the mean time the audience almost held its breath in anticipation of the cunningly deferred onset. Presently the two birds, as if by one impulse, rushed towards each other, and a simultaneous attack took place. The contest, when the birds are armed with steel gaffs, rarely lasts more than eight or ten minutes before one or both are so injured as to end the fight.
To feel all that and the rest of it to walk to the tops of your shoes in pine chips in the spar yards, to measure the lengths of booms and gaffs for yourself if you weren't sure who were going to spread the big mainsails, to go up in the sail-lofts and see the sailmakers, bench after bench of them, making their needles and the long waxed threads fly through the canvas that it seemed a pity wasn't to stay so white forever to see them spread the canvas out along the chalk lines on the varnished floor, fixing leach and luff ropes to them and putting the leather-bound cringles in, and putting them in too so they'd stay, for by and by men's lives would depend on the way they hung on all that, railways, sail-lofts, vessels, boats, docks alive with men jumping to their work skippers, crews, carpenters, riggers, lumpers, all thinking, talking, and, I suppose, dreaming of the season's work ahead m-m there was life for a man!
Will thought them stumpy and heavy-looking; and he did not admire the red sails with crooked gaffs, and smiled at the blue pennants, stretched out on stiff frames that turned with the wind. But when Greta showed him a tiny windlass on the deck, by means of which she easily raised and lowered the mast, he came to the conclusion that a Dutch canal-boat was not to be despised.
The topmasts were stripped of their sails, and lowered; the loose and standing rigging strapped to the masts; the spars, forebooms, and gaffs unshipped, and secured to the outside of the vessels to avert the danger from splinters, which, in naval actions, is often greater than from the shots themselves.
Travis took no man's dust in the Tennessee Valley. At county fairs he had a walk-over. He had inherited The Gaffs from his grandfather, for both his parents died in his infancy, and his two remaining uncles gave their lives in Virginia, early in the war, following the flag of the Confederacy.
The great mast, with its yards still attached, soon rested upon the water alongside the wreck for the Pandora might now be called a wreck and upon these, as a foundation, the raft was speedily laid. The spare spars and yards, the gaffs and booms, were thrown upon top, and soon lashed firm by those who had descended to the water, and who now found footing upon the huge floating mass of timber.
Divide The Gaffs with Tom Travis? He would as soon think of dividing Alice's love with him. In the soul of Richard Travis there was no such word as division. In the selfishness of his life, it had ever been all or nothing. All night he thought, he walked the halls of the old house, he ran over a hundred solutions of it in his mind.
Our yards and gaffs were somewhat heavy, as we had no proper-sized spars to make them from. We found a good supply of rope on board the ship, from which we fitted our running rigging. At last we had a vessel of some twenty to five-and-twenty tons, in all appearance ready for sea.
Not grand, but the kind one loves to wander over. Strength was written in the face of Richard Travis the owner of The Gaffs intellectual, physical, passion-strength, strength of purpose and of doing. Strength, but not moral strength; and hence lacking all of being all-conquering. He had that kind of strength which made others think as he thought, and do as he would have them do.
His tail lashed the sea to foam, a big, pointed head showed up, squirming under the hook. "Now!" cried Peer, and two gaffs struck at the same moment, the boat heeled over, letting in a rush of water, and Klaus, dropping his oars, sprang into the bow, with a cry of "Jesus, save us!"
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