Then there came a breath of wind. At first it was soft as an angel's
whisper. It grew stronger, and ruffled the sea. Every man lifted his
eyes and looked at his mates. Each was struggling with a painful idea
that perhaps he was the victim of a delusion of the sense. But the chill
breath of the wind was indeed among them.
"Isn't it beginning to puff up from the sou'west?" asked Crennell, in an
uncertain whisper. At that old Quilleash jumped to his feet. The idea of
the supernatural had gone from him. "Now for the sheets and to make
sail," he cried, and spat the quid.
One after one the men got up and bustled about. Their limbs were
wellnigh frozen stiff. All was stir and animation in an instant. Pulling
at the ropes, the men had begun to laugh, yes, with their husky,
grating, tear-drowned voices, even to laugh through their grisly beards.
A gruesome sense of the ludicrous had taken hold of them. It was the
swift reaction from solemn thoughts. When the boat felt her canvas she
shook herself like a sea-bird trying her wings, then shot off at full
flight.
"Bear a hand there. Lay on, man alive. Why, you're going about like a
brewing-pan, old fellow. Pull, boy, pull. What are your arms for, eh?"
Old Quilleash's eyes, which had been dim with tears a moment ago,
glistened with grisly mischief. "Who hasn't heard that a Manxman's arms
are three legs?" he said with a hungry grin. How the men laughed! What
humor there was now in the haggard old saw!
"Where are you for, Billy?" cried Corkell.
"Peel, boy, Peel, d---- it, Peel," shouted Quilleash.
"Hurroo! Bould fellow! Ha, ha, he, he."
"Hurroo! There's gold on the cushags yet."
How they worked! In two minutes the mast was stepped, the mainsail and
mizzen were up, and they filled away and stood out. From the shores of
death they had sailed somehow into the waters of life, and hope was
theirs once more.
They began to talk of what had caused the wind. "It was the blessed St.
Patrick," said Corkell. St. Patrick was the patron saint of that sea,
and Corkell was more than half a Catholic, his mother being a fish-wife
from Kinsale.
"Saint Patrick be ----," cried Ned Teare, with a scornful laugh, and
they got to words and at length almost to blows.
Old Quilleash was at the tiller. "Drop it," he shouted, "we're in the
down stream for Contrary, and we'll be in harbor in ten minutes."
"God A'mighty! it's running a ten-knots tide," said Teare.
In less than ten minutes they were sailing under the castle islet up to
the wooden pier, having been eighteen hours on the water.
Not a man of the four had given a thought to Dan, whether he wished to
go back to the island, or to make a foreign port where his name and his
crime would be unknown. Only the lad Davy had hung about him where he
sat by the hatches. Dan's pale face was firm and resolute, and the dream
of a smile was on his hard-drawn lips. But his despair had grown into
courage, and he knew no fear at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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