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Updated: June 23, 2025
The tow-rope, tautening under the last stroke of our oars, had drawn the boat back in its recoil, and she now drifted close under the Gauntlet's jibboom, which ran out upon a very short bowsprit. I stood up, and reaching for a grip on the dolphin-striker, swung myself on to the bobstay and thence to the cap of the bowsprit, where I sat astride for a moment while Billy followed.
He, too, looked at the engineer, who gave the stare back with redoubled hate. Tense grew the expectation of the Folk. "What the devil now?" thought Stern, tautening event muscle for the expected attack. But attack there came none. Instead the patriarch asked a question of those who stood near him; and hands now guided the old man toward the place where Stern was standing, bound.
The paper unwinds, runs over the rollers, e and e', which serve only for tautening it, and then passes between the two cylinders, A and B. The cylinder, A, carries the form, and B carries the blanket, and the paper thus receives its first impression.
I drowsed off, to wake with a jump of all my body from a dream that a giant was pressing down on me, that he had my legs doubled up over me and was breaking them into my breast.... The cramps.... I stood up and rubbed my legs till the taut tendons softened and stretched ... but when I dared bend them the littlest, the tautening and drawing twisted them again.
Between them the moon fitfully shone occasionally and an odd star or two peeped out here and there; while our good ship was bowling along under her topgallants, which had been set again by the commander over the double-reefed topsails, with her courses and jib and spanker, and the foretopmast staysail, continuing under the same canvas during the night, without hauling a sheet or tautening a brace, the wind hardly shifting half-a-point all the while.
The rope was a new and stout one, and there was not much fear that the boats would break away from each other, but the strain set up by the alternate slackening and tautening of the painter, as first one boat and then the other was urged forward by the 'scend of the sea, was tremendous, and strained both craft to a positively dangerous degree.
The great steel hawser of the tug, as she strained all her powers, was now tautening and slackening, and then, as steam strove for the mastery against the storm, again tightening with enormous force till it became like a rigid iron bar.
Forgotten now the wounded arm, the crude and absurd implements; forgotten everything but just that sole, indomitable thought: "I've got to win!" Came now a lull in the struggles of the monster. Stern hauled in. Another rush, met by a paying-out, a gradual tautening of the line, a strong and steady pull. "He's tiring," exulted Stern. "Be ready when I bring him close!"
We fixed a running noose to the wire rope of a derrick, and after a few attempts succeeded in dropping it over the shark's head, and in tautening it behind his fins; the steam-derrick did the rest. I could see distinctly six or seven pilot-fish playing round the shark.
He was sliding over the rail, the line tautening to his weight in no time, and he talking all the time. "Lower away lower, lower! Faster faster than that he's rising again second time and drifting under the wharf, sure's fate! Faster faster what's wrong? what's caught there? let her run!" The halyards had become fouled, and Peter was trying to clear them, calling to Clancy to wait.
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