Page:Strange Tales Volume 02 Number 03 (1932-10).djvu/59

346 seas which wrenched her lofty bridge-deck.

A steward, who was having a rather difficult time keeping his feet, fetched him a sandwich and a cup of coffee. In a little while two other passengers appeared for breakfast: one a British salesman, and the other an American ship's officer, out of a professional berth and going to Antigua to help take off a sugar crop. The three men, warmed now by the coffee and the comfortable security of the lounge, snored and chattered intimately.

Nevertheless, a sinister foreboding seemed to hang over them. At last Matthews, the American, voiced it plainly:

“I hope she'll make St. Thomas! Well—I’ve always heard that Captain Baird knows his business; a good sailorman, they say."

“Do you think there'll be any let-up when we get into the Gulf Stream?" This was the Englishman, breaking a long, dreary silence.

“More likely a let-down, I'd say,” replied the pessimistic Matthews. “She’ll be worse, if anything, in my judgment."

This gloomy prediction justified itself the following morning. The Barbadian had entered the Gulf Stream, and the malevolent fury of the sea increased with daylight. Hewitt came on deck, and, leaning against the jamb of a partly opened hatch on the protected lee-side, looked out upon a world of heaving gray-green water with that feeling of awe which the sea in all its many moods invariably awakened in him. A gust of wind caught his unbuttoned coat, and out of a pocket and onto the wet, heaving deck slid the morocco-bound Testament which his mother had given him years before.

He stepped out through the hatchway, cautiously, making his way precariously across the deck to where it lay caught in the metal scupper. He arrived safely against the rail, which he gripped firmly with one hand, while he stooped to recover the book with the other. As he bent forward the tail-end of an enormous overtopping wave which had caught the vessel under her weather-quarter, caught him and raised his body like a feather over the rail's top.

But Hewitt was not cast into the sea. With a frantic, instinctive movement, he clung to the rail as his body struck violently against the ship's side.

With the Barbadian’s righting herself he found himself hanging on like grim death, his body dangling perilously over the angry waters, the Testament clutched firmly in his other hand.

E attempted to set his feet against one of the lower railings, to hook his legs about a stanchion. He almost succeeded, and would doubtless have been back upon the deck in safety had not the crest of the following wave dislodged his one-hand hold on the rail. The angry sea took him to itself, while the laboring ship, bounding into the teeth of the gale, bore on, all unconcerned over his sudden, unceremonious departure.

The incidents of Hewitt's life marched through his consciousness with an incredible rapidity. He remembered his mother poignantly—his mother dead these eight years—and a salt tear mingled with the vast saltiness of this cold, inhospitable ocean which had taken him to its disastrous embrace.

Down and down into the watery inferno he sank, weighted down with his winter boots and heavy overcoat. Strangely enough, he was not afraid, but he responded to the major mechanical impulses of a drowning man—the rigid holding of his breath, the desperate