The Ghost Ship/Chapter Five.

Chapter Five. The Gale Freshens.

Presently a cloud of thick black smoke again pouring forth from the funnels showed that Mr Stokes had set the engine-room staff vigorously to work to carry out the skipper’s orders; while the vibration of the upper deck below our feet afforded proof, were such needed, that the machinery was being driven to its utmost capacity, the regular throbbing motion caused by the revolving shaft being distinctly perceptible above the rolling of the vessel and the jar of the opposing waves against her bow plates when she pitched more deeply than usual and met the sea full butt-end on.

The surface fog, or mist, which had lately obscured the view, rising from the water immediately after the last gleams of the sunset had disappeared from the western sky, had now cleared away, giving place to the pale spectral light of night, an occasional star twinkling here and there in the dark vault overhead, like a sign-post in the immensity of space, making the wild billowy waste, through which we tore with all the power of wind and steam, seem all the wilder from contrast.

We had carried on like this for about an hour, steering steadily to the southwards, without catching sight again of the strange ship, though Spokeshave and I had continued to let off signal rockets and burn blue lights at intervals, the gale increasing in force each instant, and the waves growing bigger and bigger, so that they rose over the topsail as we raced along, when, all at once, a great green sea broke amidships, coming aboard of us just abaft of the engine-room hatchway, flooding all the waist on either side of the deckhouse and rolling down below in a regular cataract of tumid water, sweeping everything before it.

“That’s pretty lively,” exclaimed Captain Applegarth, clutching hold of the rail to preserve his balance as he turned to the quartermaster at the wheel. “Steady there, my man! Keep her full and by!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” answered Atkins. “But she do yaw so, when she buries her bows. She’s got too much sail on her, sir.”

“I know that,” said the skipper. “But I’m going to carry on as long as I can, all the same, my man.”

Even as he spoke, however, a second sea followed the first, nearly washing us all off the bridge, and smashing the glass of the skylight over the engine-room, besides doing other damage.

By Captain Applegarth’s directions, a piece of heavy tarpaulin was lashed over the broken skylight, securing the ends to ringbolts in the deck; but hardly had the covering been made fast ere we could see the chief engineer picking his way towards us, struggling through the water that still lay a foot deep in the waist and looking as pale as death.

“Hullo, Mr Stokes,” cried the skipper, when the old chief with great difficulty had gained the vantage of the bridge-ladder. “What’s the matter now, old fellow?”

He was too much exhausted at first to reply.

“What’s the matter?” he echoed ironically when able at last to speak. “Oh, nothing at all worth mentioning; nothing at all. I told you how it would be, sir, if you insisted on going ahead full speed in such weather as we’re having! Why, Cap’en Applegarth, the stoke-hold’s full of water and the bilgepump’s choked, that’s all; and the fires, I expect, will be drowned out in another minute or two. That’s what’s the matter, sir, believe me or not!”

With that the poor old chap, who was quite overcome with the exertions he had gone through and his pent-up emotion, broke down utterly, bursting into a regular boohoo.

“Dear me, Mr Stokes; Mr Stokes, don’t give way like that,” said the skipper soothingly, patting him on the back to calm him down, being a very good-hearted man at bottom, in spite of his strict discipline and insistence on being “captain of his own ship,” as he termed it. “Don’t give way like that, old friend! Things will come all right by-and-bye.”

“O-o-h, will they?” snivelled the old chap, refusing to be comforted, like a veritable Rachel mourning for her children. “We may possibly get rid of the water below, but the crosshead bearings are working loose, and I’d like to know who’s going to give me a new gudgeon pin?”

“Hang your gudgeon pin!” cried the skipper irascibly, not perhaps for the moment attaching the importance it demanded to this small but essential part of the engines, uniting the connecting rod of the crank shaft with the piston which he thus irreverently anathematised; and then, struck by the comic aspect of the situation, with the waves breaking over us and the elements in mad turmoil around us, while the fat old chief was blubbering there like a boy about his gudgeon pin as if bewailing some toy that had been taken from him, that he burst out with a roar of laughter, which was so contagious that, in spite of the gloomy outlook and our perilous surroundings, Mr Fosset and all of us on the bridge joined in, even the quartermaster not being able to prevent a grin from stealing over his crusty weatherbeaten face, though the man at the wheel on board ship, when on duty, is technically supposed to be incapable of expressing any emotion beyond such as may be connected with the compass card and the coursing of the ship. “Wha—wha—what’s the matter with that now, old chap? One would think it was a whale and not a gudgeon, you make such a fuss about it.”

Of course the captain’s joke set us all off cackling again; Mr Spokeshave’s “he-he-he” sounding out, high in the treble, above the general cachination.

This exasperated Mr Stokes, making the old fellow quite furious.

“This is no laughing matter, Cap’en Applegarth,” said he with great dignity, standing up as erectly as he could and puffing his corpulent figure out to such an extent that I thought he would burst. “I’ll have ye to know that, sir. Nor did I come on deck, sir, at the peril of my life almost, to be made a jeer block of, though I’m only the chief engineer of the ship and you’re the ca’p’en.”

He spoke with so stately an air that I confess I felt sorry I had given away to any merriment at his expense, while the others grew serious in a moment; and as for Atkins, his whilom grinning face seemed now to be carved out of some species of wood of a particularly hard and fibrous nature.

“Now, don’t get angry, Stokes, old fellow,” cried the skipper shoving out his fist and gripping that of the chief in the very nick of time, for the vessel gave a lurch just then and, still “standing on his dignity,” as the poor old chap was, without holding on to anything, he would have been precipitated over the rail to the deck below, but for the skipper’s friendly aid. “Don’t be angry with me, old chum. I’m sorry I laughed; but you and I have been shipmates too long together for us to fall out now. Why, what the devil has got over you, Stokes? You’ve never been so huffy since I first sailed with you, and I should have thought you one of the last in the world to take offence at a little bit of harmless chaff.”

“Well, well, Cap’en Applegarth, let it bide, let it bide,” replied the old chief, coming round at once, his rage calming down as quickly as it had risen. “I don’t mind your laughing at me if you have a mind too. I daresay it all seemed very funny to you, my being anxious about my engines, but I’m hanged if I can see the fun myself.”

“But it was funny, Stokes; deuced funny, I tell you, ‘ho-ho-ho!’” rejoined the skipper, bursting out into a regular roar again at the recollection of the scene, his jolly laugh causing even the cause of it to smile against his will. “However, there’s an end of it, gudgeon pin and all. Now, about that stoke-hold of yours. It’s flooded, you say?”

“Aye; there’s eighteen inches of water there now, right up to the footplates,” said the engineer with a grave air. “The bilge-pumps won’t act, and all my staff of stokers are so busy keeping up the steam that I can’t spare a man to see to clearing out the suctions, though if the water rises any higher, it will soon be up to the furnace bars and put out the fires.”

“Humph, that’s serious,” answered the skipper meditatively. “I’ll see what I can do to help you. I say, Fosset?”

“Aye, aye, sir! Want me?”

“Yes,” replied the skipper. “Mr Stokes is shorthanded below and says the bilge-pumps are choked. Can you spare him a man or two to help clear the suctions? I daresay there’s a lot of stray dunnage washing about under the stoke-hold plates. You might go down and bear a hand yourself, as I won’t leave the bridge.”

“Certainly, sir; I’ll go at once with Mr Stokes and take some of the starboard watch with me. It’s close on seven bells and they’d soon have to turn out, anyway, to relieve the men now on deck.”

“That’ll do very well, Fosset,” said the skipper, and, raising his voice, he shouted over the rail forwards—

“Bosun, call the watch!”

Bill Masters, who had been waiting handy on the deck amidships, immediately below the bridge, expecting some such order with the need, as he thought, of the skipper reducing sail, at once stuck his shrill boatswain’s pipe to his lips and gave the customary call: Whee-ee-oo-oo—whee-ee-ee.

“Starboard watch, ahoy!”

The men came tumbling out of the fo’c’s’le at the sound of the whistle and the old seadog’s stentorian hail; whereupon the first mate, selecting six of the lot to accompany him, he followed Mr Stokes towards the engine-room hatchway.

Before disappearing below, however, the engineer made a last appeal to the skipper.

“I say, cap’en,” he sang out, stopping half-way as he toddled aft, somewhat disconsolately in spite of the assistance given him, “now won’t you ease down, sir, just to oblige me? The engines won’t stand it, sir; and it’s my duty to tell you so, sir.”

“All right, Stokes; you’ve told me, and may consider that you’ve done your duty in doing so,” replied the skipper, grimly laconic. “But I’m not going to ease down till seven bells, my hearty, unless we run across Dick Haldane’s ship before, when we’ll go as slow as you like and bear up again on our course to the westwards.”

“Very good, sir,” answered the old chief as he lifted his podgy legs over the coaming of the hatchway, prior to burying himself in the cimmerian darkness of the opening, wherein Mr Fosset and his men had already vanished.

“I’ll make things all snug below, sir, and bank the fires as soon as you give the signal.”

With that, he, too, was lost to sight.

The skipper, I could see, was not very easy in his mind when left alone; for he paced jerkily to and fro between the wheel-house and the weather end of the bridge as well as he was able, the vessel being very unsteady, rolling about among the big rollers like a huge grampus and pitching almost bows under water sometimes, though the old barquey was buoyant enough, notwithstanding the lot of deadweight she carried in her bowels, rising up after each plunge as frisky as a cork, when she would shake herself with a movement that made her tremble all over, as if to get rid of the loose spray and spindrift that hung on to her shining black head, and which the wind swept before it like flecks of snow into the rigging, spattering and spattering against the almost red-hot funnels up which the steam blast was rushing mingled with the flare of the funnels below.

After continuing his restless walk for a minute or two, the skipper stopped by the binnacle, looking at the compass card, which moved about as restlessly as the old barquey and himself, oscillating in every direction.

“We ought to have come up with her by now, Haldane,” he said, addressing me, as I stood with Spokeshave on the other side of the wheel-house. “Don’t you think so from the course she was going when you sighted her?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered, “if she hasn’t gone down!”

“I hope not, my boy,” said he; “but I’m very much afraid she has, or else we’ve passed ahead of her.”

“That’s not likely, sir,” I replied. “She looked as if crossing our track when I last saw her; and, though we were going slower then, we must be gaining on her now, I should think.”

“We ought to be,” said he. “We must be going seventeen knots at the least with wind and steam.”

“Aye, aye, sir, all that,” corroborated old Masters, the boatswain, who had come up on the bridge unnoticed. “Beg pardon, sir, but we can’t carry on much longer with all that sail forrad. The fore-topmast is a-complainin’ like anythink, I can tell ye, sir. Chirvell, the carpenter, and me’s examinin’ it and we thinks it’s got sprung at the cap, sir.”

“If that’s the case, my man,” said Captain Applegarth to this, “we’d better take in sail at once. It’s a pity, too, with such a fine wind. I was just going to spare the engines and ease down for a bit, trusting to our sails alone, but if there’s any risk of the spars going, as you say, wrong, we must reduce our canvas instead.”

“There’s no help for it, sir,” returned the boatswain quickly. “Either one or t’other must go! Shall I pass the word, sir, to take in sail?”

“Aye, take in the rags!”

“Fo’c’s’le, ahoy there!” yelled Masters instantly, taking advantage of the long-desired permission. “All hands take in sail!”

We had hauled the trysails and other fore and aft canvas, which was comparatively useless to a steamer when running before the wind at the time we had altered course towards the south, in quest of the ship in distress, the Star of the North speeding along with only her fore-topsail and fore-topgallantsail set in addition to her fore-topmast staysail and mizzen staysail and jib.

The gale, however, had increased so much, the wind freshening as it shifted more and more to the north that this sail was too much for her, the canvas bellying out, and the upper spars “buckling” as the vessel laboured in the heavy sea, the stays taut as fiddle-strings and everything at the utmost tension.

The skipper perceived this now, when almost too late.

“Let go your topgallant bowline, and lee sheet and halliards,” he roared out, holding on with both hands to the rail and bending over the bridge cloth as he shouted to the men forward who had tumbled out of the forecastle on the boatswain’s warning hail. “Stand by your clewlines and by your boat lines!”

The men sprang to the ropes with a will, but ere they had begun to cast them off from the cleats an ominous sound was heard from aloft, and, splitting from clew to earring, our poor topgallantsail blew clean out of the boltropes with a loud crack as if a gun had been fired off, the fragments floating away ahead of us, borne on the wings of the wind like a huge kite, until it disappeared in the dark chiaraoscura of the distant horizon, where heaven and sea met amid the shadows of night.

Just then a most wonderful thing happened to startle us further!

While all of us gazed at the wreck aloft, expecting the topsail to follow suit before it could be pulled, though the hands were racing up rigging for the purpose, the halliards having been at once let go and the yard lowered, a strange light over the topsail made us look aft, when we saw a huge ball of fire pass slowly across the zenith from the east to the west, illuminating not only the northern arc of the sky, but the surface of the water also, immediately beneath its path, and making the faces of the men in the rigging and indeed any object on board, stand out in relief, shining with that corpse-like glare or reflection produced by the electric light, the effect being weird and unearthly in the extreme!

At the same instant one of the lookouts in the bows who had still remained at his post and had probably been awakened from a quiet “caulk” by the awful portent, suddenly shouted out in a ringing voice, that thrilled through every heart on board—

“Sail ho!”

Captain Applegarth and the rest of us on the bridge faced round again at once.

“Where away, where away, my man?” cried the skipper excitedly. “Where away?”

“Right ahead of us, sir,” replied the man in an equally eager tone. “And not half a cable’s length away!”

“My God!” exclaimed old Masters, the boatswain, whose grey hair seemed to stand on end with terror as we all now looked in the new direction indicated and saw a queer ghost-like craft gliding along mysteriously in the same direction as ourselves, and so close alongside that I could have chucked a biscuit aboard her without any difficulty. “That there be no mortal vessel that ever sailed the seas. Mark my words, Cap’en Applegarth, that there craft be either The Flying Dutchman, as I’ve often heard tell on, but never seen meself, or a ghost-ship; and—Lord help us—we be all doomed men!”