Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/241



HE old fisherman's barometer—his knee—proved itself. That afternoon it was breezing in fitful, nasty gusts; by evening it was blowing half a gale. That night the sun set on an angry sea, and the Mary K. Jones was making heavy weather of it.

By midnight a merciless North Atlantic hurricane was raging, and the schooner, close-reefed, head into it, pounded and battered, was laying-to, fighting to ride out the storm—and it was an anxious little group in glistening yellow oilskins that gathered by the wheel and in the scanty lee of the "house." What talking they did and it was little, was done in fierce shouts against the roar of the wind that caught up the words and flung them away like flying chaff.

All about it was inky black—save for the great foam-crested billows, churning white, that surged chaotically in mad, wild revel on every hand. A crash of thunder boomed and rolled and reverberated and, muttering ominously, died away in a shuddering, long-drawn-out moan; a great forked tongue of jagged lightning, rending the heavens, illuminated the scene, and for a brief instant made awesome daylight on the clean-swept deck of the heaving, labouring little craft—the dories were gone; loose gear, water cask, everything movable had disappeared.

At the wheel were Jonah Sully and the Frenchman;