Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here
rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously
abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small boat
navigation.
The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six
inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were
rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest
dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: "Gawd! That was
a narrow clip." As he remarked it he invariably gazed eastward over the
broken sea.
The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes
raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the
stern. It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap.
The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and
wondered why he was there.
The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that
profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least,
to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm
fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a
vessel is rooted deep in the timbers of her, though he commanded for a
day or a decade, and this captain had on him the stern impression of
a scene in the greys of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump
of a top-mast with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the
waves, went low and lower, and down. Thereafter there was something
strange in his voice. Although steady, it was deep with mourning, and
of a quality beyond oration or tears.
"Keep 'er a little more south, Billie," said he.
"'A little more south,' sir," said the oiler in the stern.
A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking broncho, and,
by the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced
and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she
rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously
high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic
thing, and, moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems
in white water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave,
requiring a new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully
bumping a crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long
incline, and arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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