He knotted a big handkerchief around his head and took his place on the grating once more.

“What can we do now?” bawled Murray.

“You’re the one that’s issuin’ orders ’board here now,” growled the Cap’n, bending baleful gaze on the foreman of the Ancients.  “Go for’ard and tell ’em to chop down both masts, and then bore some holes in the bottom to let out the bilge-water.  Then they can set her on fire.  There might be something them blasted Ancients could do to a vessel on fire.”

“I don’t believe in bein’ sarcastic when people are tryin’ to do the best they can,” objected Hiram.  He noted that the Dobson was once again setting straight out to sea.  She was butting her snub nose furiously into swelling combers.  The slaty bench of clouds had lifted into the zenith.  Scud trailed just over the swaying masts.  The shore line was lost in haze.  “Don’t be stuffy any longer, Cap’n,” he pleaded.  “We’ve gone fur enough.  I give up.  You are deep-water, all right!”

Cap’n Sproul made no reply.  Suddenly catching a moment that seemed favorable, he lashed the wheel, and with mighty puffing and grunting “inched” in the main-sheet.  “She ought to have a double reef,” he muttered.  “But them petrified sons of secos couldn’t take in a week’s wash.”

“You can see for yourself that the boys are seasick,” resumed Hiram, when the Cap’n took the wheel again.  “If you don’t turn ’round—­”

“Mr. Look,” grated the skipper, “I’ve got just a word or two to say right now.”  His sturdy legs were straddled, his brown hands clutched the spokes of the weather-worn wheel.  “I’m runnin’ this packet from now on, and it’s without conversation.  Understand?  Don’t you open your yap.  And you go for’ard and tell them steer calves that I’ll kill the first one that steps foot aft the mainmast.”

There was that in the tones and in the skipper’s mien of dignity as he stood there, fronting and defying once again his ancient foe, the ocean, which took out of Hiram all his courage to retort.  And after a time he went forward, dragging himself cautiously, to join the little group of misery huddled in the folds of the fallen canvas.

“A cargo of fools to save!” growled Cap’n Sproul, his eyebrows knotted in anxiety.  “Myself among ’em!  And they don’t know what the matter is with ’em.  We’ve struck the line gale—­that’s what we’ve done!  Struck it with a choppin’-tray for a bo’t and a mess of rooty-baggy turnips for a crew!  And there’s only one hole to crawl out of.”

XXII

The wind had shifted when it settled into the blow—­a fact that the Cap’n’s shipmates did not realize, and which he was too disgusted by their general inefficiency to explain to them.  In his crippled condition, in the gathering night, he figured that it would be impossible for him to make Portland harbor, the only accessible refuge.  The one chance was to ride it out, and this he set himself to do, grimly silent, contemptuously reticent.  He held her nose up to the open sea, allowing her only steerageway, the gale slithering off her flattened sail.