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Updated: April 30, 2025
Remember how you taught me to yield to the undertow." An unusually large breaker for so mild a surf curled overhead, and he climbed out on her again, sinking both of them under as the wave-crest over-fell and smashed down. "Forgive me," he mumbled through pain clenched teeth, as they drew in their first air again. "And leave me." He spoke jerkily, with pain-filled pauses between his sentences.
And "a pretty pickle" it was, with the "porps" floundering bodily from wave-crest to wave-crest, the winds shrieking through the cordage, and the storm-fiends brewing a hurricane like to engulf master and crew! In the forehold were rebels who would sink us all to the bottom of the sea if they could. Aft, powder enough to blow us all to eternity!
He glanced at the shabby watch he wore upon the steel lip-strap, and waited. She was aware of the action, though she never turned her head. She was weighing the question, to tell or not to tell? Her soul hung poised like a seagull in the momentary shelter of a giant wave-crest. Another moment, and the battle with the raging gale and the driving halberds of the sleet would begin again.
Then he saw, out in the gloom and mistiness, the white gleaming of a wave-crest, rising and sinking, but sweeping steadily toward him, and knew that it would dash upon his narrow foothold. Could he survive another?
He still felt the throb of them beneath his feet. Well, that much was good anyway. And the skipper? Was he still at the wheel? Must be, for the yacht continued to take the waves head-on. Short and light as she was, the craft appeared to leap from wave-crest to wave-crest. Now she missed the leap by a foot and the water drenched her deck anew.
Up and down went the buoy, pitching and reeling dizzily. An occasional wave-crest buried the boys to the waist. "No place for a man with a weak stomach, hey, Perce," said Spurling. "You couldn't have stood this two months ago." Percy was gazing intently southward. "What's that white spot?" he asked, suddenly, pointing to a glittering patch fifty or sixty yards square. "School of herring!
An awful place it always is; and Elsley saw it at an awful time, as the glare unveiled below him a sea of rock-waves, all sharp on edge, pointing toward him on every side: or rather one wave-crest of a sea; for twenty yards beyond, all sloped away into the abysmal dark. Terrible were those rocks below; and ten times more terrible as seen through the lurid glow of his distempered brain.
At one moment her hull was completely hidden by an intervening wave-crest, her sails only being visible; the next she would rush into view, her low hull deluged with spray which glanced in the moonlight like a shower of diamonds as it flew over her almost to the height of her low mast-heads and dissipated itself in the sea to leeward; while her masts bent like willow wands, inclining at what seemed to me a fearfully perilous angle with the horizon.
She was tossed about like the merest cockle-shell, and every time that she rose upon the crest of a sea, the wind took her rag of a staysail, distending it as though it would tear it clean out of the bolt-ropes, and heeling the vessel over until we could see the whole of her bottom nearly down to her keel; and then her sharp bows would cleave the wave-crest in a perfect cataract of foam and spray, and away she would settle down once more with a heavy weather-roll into the trough.
The flap of ropes, the creak of yard-arms, the rush of waves which were already washing the deck, the chug-chug-chug of the prow of the brave little craft as she leaped from wave-crest to wave-crest; all this made such music as an orchestra might, had every man musician of them gone mad. And this was the "silence" Curlie did not for a long time break.
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