There’s a sensation akin to pain in the midriff when a mast goes by the board. It is bad enough when actual stress of heavy weather brings that sickening, crunching crackle. But this thing was positive wantonness; this setting of extra canvas to a whipping “frother,” new canvas, at that, and without even the precaution of a single “preventer!” Old sails would have saved the sticks. In that first instant of terror, the girl instinctively clutched me, and I held her fast a moment in my happiness before I assured her: “There’s not a bit of danger! It’s just a mess, that’s all!” And it certainly was a mess! The schooner wallowed in the trough of the quick sea that had followed the squall’s first fury, the sorriest mass of confusion imaginable. It was a positive sin. The masts, still hanging to the shrouds which hadn’t all parted, thumped their menace against the planking of the side; the main boom, still fast to its sheet, ground at the mahogany rail as it sawed between goose-neck and traveler. The canvas, mountains of it, flapped, rolled, and puffed frantically, a matted mass of cordage to leeward, wire stays of stiff crinkle, turnbuckles, spreaders, and blocks. It was a time that called for quick action. And quick action it got. I never saw greater promptness. Stroth was fairly beside himself, and his emotion was--_joy_! “Oho!” he bellowed, in positive happiness, the very instant we righted to an even keel, “here we have it now--and something like!” Then he was all over the boat, roaring orders in a tone of voice of which I never would have believed him capable. And, quick to the inspiration of that personality, the men jumped to the task of clearing away. “Toss me that ax!” cried the owner to old Steve, and he himself went at a steel stay that held a spar from moving. “Tie first, then cut!” He had a sharp way with him that made you start an instant before you sprang to the task. I felt the impulse of it, though my place was certainly to soothe the girl. Then he caught a look at me over his shoulder, and shouted: “Take her below, Grey, to her cabin. I’ll need you in five minutes. And, mind you, look sharp!” I know when to obey a man--and silently. The girl still clung to me, but her terror came not so much from the vessel’s condition as it sprang from consternation at the remarkable change in her father. But she didn’t say a word except to thank me when I left her at her stateroom door. “I’m all right now, Mr. Grey,” she said quietly, though the haunt of some indefinite fear still showed in those wonderful eyes of hers. “You’d better get back to deck. He may need you.” And the way she said that pronoun told where the trouble lay. Even in the short interval I had been below deck, the weather had taken on a change for the better. A quick squall is almost always a short one, bearing out the old adage: “Short warning, soon past.”