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Presently the weight shot forward and plunged into the sea a fathom or two ahead of the ship, the coils of thin line leapt from the leadsman's hand, and, as the ship surged slowly ahead, the line slackened, showing that the lead had reached bottom, and the leadsman, bringing the sounding line up and down, proclaimed the depth eighteen fathoms!
'Starboard lead there! and quick about it! This was another shock. I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel; but I would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see new dangers on that side, and away I would spin to the other; only to find perils accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again. Then came the leadsman's sepulchral cry 'D-e-e-p four!
I was sorry to be leaving. When the winch began to clank, as the cable was hove in, I gathered up my lead-line, and went to the leadsman's dicky, or little projecting platform, on the starboard side. I was to be the leadsman that night, and as we should soon be moving, I made the breast-rope secure, and stood by.
As the tender moved ahead of the great ship, the lead-line was struck out of the leadsman's hands; but another line was immediately found, and the little vessel continued her course. Though she received nine shots in her hull, the leadsman was the only man wounded on board. Having performed her duty, she steamed off out of harm's way.
I want to be identified to a wider audience." "All right, Sam. What name do you want to use Josh?" "No, I want to sign them Mark Twain. It is an old river term, a leadsman's call, signifying two fathoms twelve feet. It has a richness about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark night; it meant safe waters."
Bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat, and all the pilots stood shoulder to shoulder at his back. 'She'll not make it! somebody whispered. The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it was down to 'Eight-and-a-half!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... Seven- and Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer 'Stand by, now!
"I called down to know what the lead reported. I felt my voice shaking and the leadsman's voice shook a bit too as he called back that he had found the bottom with the red seventeen fathom mark. Half a minute later he sang out that his line had lost it. I was just about calling to let go anchor when away on our starboard bow we heard the pilots hailing.
Through having mimicked the leadsman all day long, and also, perhaps, owing to all the drink he had consumed, he had become so much the part which he had played that he was unable to shake it off; and since he had brought into prominence the faults and weaknesses of the leadsman, he had, as it were, acquired them, and that flash from the leadsman's eye had rammed them down to the very bottom of his soul, just as a ramrod pushes the powder into the barrel of a gun.
Would they ever have returned home if he had not read the stars? Smack! an egg hit him between the eyebrows. "Leadsman, you're a braggart!" said the miller. "We've known that for a long time; we knew it when you wrote to the paper saying the Great Man was another Humboldt!" Now another of the leadsman's weaknesses gained the upper hand.
"Wept and prayed!" repeated the judge, looking from the child to the father, in the manner of a man that fancied he did not hear aright. "I said both, mein Herr; if the former was a weakness, the latter was a duty." "This is strange language in the mouth of a Leadsman's child!"
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