“Tom,” said Jack, at last, in a low voice, “I’ve sailed in a many ships in my time, but I never saw one behave like this. She bothers me; I don’t know what to make of her.” He paused for a moment, and then he clapped his hand to his thigh. “D—n it,” said he, “she ain’t either equipped or stowed in a fit way. She ought never to have put out from Lewestown Harbor in her condition, and, without I’m much mistaken, we’ll find that out long before we reach Key West.” Then he turned over the orders and went below to get his breakfast, leaving Tom in charge of the deck. The day passed without especial event, and that night at the mid-watch Tom turned in to get a little sleep. It seemed to him that he had hardly closed his eyes when he was aroused by the sound of the boatswain’s voice ringing, as it were, in his very ears: “_All hands reef topsails!_” Tom tumbled out of his bunk and stood on the cabin floor. There was a noise of pounding and grinding alongside, and the decks were careened, so that the first thought that occurred to him was that the ship was foundering. He ran up on deck without stopping a moment, for there was a vibration in the boatswain’s voice that told him that something serious had befallen. The gale had increased with a sudden and heavy squall, and the maintop-gallant-mast had gone by the board. It was hanging alongside, a tangled wreck, and it was the thumping and grinding of this that Tom had heard when he had first opened his eyes. A dozen men were at work cutting away the wreck, and Tom jumped to help them. At last it drifted away astern, a tangled mass on the surface of grey foam. All around them were seas, ten or fifteen feet high, shining with phosphorescent crests, moving solemnly forward with their black weight of thousands of tons of solid water. Amongst these the little ship labored like a living thing in pain. The men ran up aloft, and Jack, trumpet to mouth, bellowed orders that rang above all the thunder of the gale. Presently the sails were clapping and thundering in the darkness above, as the men wrestled with them. Now and then voices were to be heard through all the roaring of the waters and the howling of the wind: “Haul out to windward!” and “Light out to leeward!”—an uproar of noises that one never hears excepting on shipboard, and at such a time. Day broke with the storm blowing as furiously as ever. Tom was officer of the deck, when, about ten o’clock, Maul, the carpenter, came aft to where he was standing. He was a fine-looking fellow, broad-shouldered and deep-chested. He chucked his thumb up to his forehead, and, shifting the quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other, told Tom that which sent a thrill shivering through him: “Ten inches of water in the well, sir.” The pumps sucked at five inches, so the _Nancy Hazlewood_ had made five inches of water in the last hour.