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When I went upon deck again, I found that the breeze had softened down very considerably, and we were slipping along barely five knots through the water. Our big neighbour, the ship, could do nothing with us in such light airs, and he was now a good six miles astern. During the afternoon, the wind dropped still more, and by eight o'clock in the evening we had little more than steerage-way.
She carried a mast, stepped right forward; but no sail. She was full of people. I counted five sitting, all white with snow one by the mast, three amidships, and one in the stern sheets, steering. At least, he had a hand on the tiller: but the people had given over pulling, and the boat without steerage-way was drifting broadside-on towards the shore with the set of the tide.
She of course shot into the wind's eye in an instant, and in another minute the craft would have been on the rocks, stern-foremost, and beating her bottom in, had not Courtenay who happened to be standing close by sprung to the tiller and jammed it hard a-weather, thus causing her to pay off and forge ahead before losing steerage-way altogether.
We had hardly got steerage-way when I heard a commotion aft, a choking, angry voice, that sounded through the hubbub like Silver Tongue's, a quick, fierce, violent struggle, and then suddenly the companion hatch went shut with a bang. Even as it did so the fore-hatch followed with a crash, and everybody began to cheer.
"Aye, aye, sorr," promptly replied Tim Rooney, showing himself from behind the deck-house between the mainmast and foremast, which had previously hidden him from the view of the poop. "I'm here, sort." "Then send a hand aft to the wheel at once," rejoined Mr Mackay. "Look sharp, we're under steerage-way."
He never keeps on one tack long enough to get steerage-way, even if, in a nature like his, with those electric streamers of whim and fancy forever wavering across the vault of his brain, the needle of judgment would point in one direction long enough to strike a course by.
After touching lightly once, and getting deeper water at the next cast over the lee side, he understood the trick of the extended false Point and stood boldly along shore. And as the schooner gathered steerage-way, hugging the Point closely, Dolores ran out along the sandy beach and plunged into the sea abreast the moving vessel.
For nearly two hours I stood at the wheel, holding the ship to her course with ever-increasing difficulty; for the wind still continued to drop until we scarcely had steerage-way.
'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship.
The difficulty of arranging any system of signals or light despatch-boats which could take the place of the aids or messengers of a general, coupled with the fact that ships cannot stand still, as divisions of men do, waiting orders, but that they must have steerage-way, precludes the idea of putting an admiral of a fleet under way in a light vessel.
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