Williams jumped away from the rail, and ran aft a few steps.  I followed him, and, together, we stared upwards to see what had gone.  Indistinctly, I made out that the weather sheet of the fore t’gallant had carried away, and the clew of the sail was whirling and banging about in the air, and, every few moments, hitting the steel yard a blow, like the thump of a great sledge hammer.

“It’s the shackle, or one of the links that’s gone, I think,” I shouted to Williams, above the noise of the sail.  “That’s the spectacle that’s hitting the yard.”

“Yus!” he shouted back, and went to get hold of the clewline.  I ran to give him a hand.  At the same moment, I caught the Second Mate’s voice away aft, shouting.  Then came the noise of running feet, and the rest of the watch, and the Second Mate, were with us almost at the same moment.  In a few minutes we had the yard lowered and the sail clewed up.  Then Williams and I went aloft to see where the sheet had gone.  It was much as I had supposed; the spectacle was all right, but the pin had gone out of the shackle, and the shackle itself was jammed into the sheavehole in the yard arm.

Williams sent me down for another pin, while he unbent the clewline, and overhauled it down to the sheet.  When I returned with the fresh pin, I screwed it into the shackle, clipped on the clewline, and sung out to the men to take a pull on the rope.  This they did, and at the second heave the shackle came away.  When it was high enough, I went up on to the t’gallant yard, and held the chain, while Williams shackled it into the spectacle.  Then he bent on the clewline afresh, and sung out to the Second Mate that we were ready to hoist away.

“Yer’d better go down an’ give ’em a ‘aul,” he said.  “I’ll sty an’ light up ther syle.”

“Right ho, Williams,” I said, getting into the rigging.  “Don’t let the ship’s bogy run away with you.”

This remark I made in a moment of light-heartedness, such as will come to anyone aloft, at times.  I was exhilarated for the time being, and quite free from the sense of fear that had been with me so much of late.  I suppose this was due to the freshness of the wind.

“There’s more’n one!” he said, in that curiously short way of his.

“What?” I asked.

He repeated his remark.

I was suddenly serious.  The reality of all the impossible details of the past weeks came back to me, vivid, and beastly.

“What do you mean, Williams?” I asked him.

But he had shut up, and would say nothing.

“What do you know—­how much do you know?” I went on, quickly.  “Why did you never tell me that you—­”

The Second Mate’s voice interrupted me, abruptly: 

“Now then, up there!  Are you going to keep us waiting all night?  One of you come down and give us a pull with the ha’lyards.  The other stay up and light up the gear.”

“i, i, Sir,” I shouted back.