He wriggled back to the deck, fought his way aft. The Rellison boy desperately clinging to the tiller was being snapped back and forth like a rag. He was trying hard, he was sobbing. He just didn't have the muscle. Adam reached him barely in time. With their combined weight they got her over, and Goodwill, shuddering, righted herself.
Nobody remembered much about the actual duration of that storm afterward. It seemed long to most. But it might have lasted merely minutes. Descriptions differed wildly. Even the names of the storm differed: some swore that it was a waterspout, others called it a white squall, while Seth Selden was not the only one who was wont to refer to it as the Visitation. Some said it rained pitchforks, others that there was no rain at all. It was wet enough in all conscience, for the seas thamped over the schooner again and again. A few said that there was thunder. They were all agreed that there was lightning, closer-up than any of them had ever known, though there were many opinions of the shapes it took, the colors it showed.
Adam spent most of the storm hanging on to the tiller, bucking it, bracing it, side by side with young Abel Rellison, who, to give him credit, never faltered. Back and forth they went, back and forth, fighting. They lost all sense of time. They couldn't see much—no other men at all. They didn't even try to shout at one another but saved their wind.
And this, reflected Adam, is the same lad who a few hours ago was thinking of bashing my skull in—and this is the very stick he was thinking of doing it with!
He grinned at young Rellison, who grinned back. They struggled on.
The let-up was abrupt, and it was cruel, more of a shock, physically, than the onset. A couple of the men almost fainted. The boy Rellison flopped down on the deck. Adam went forward.
The sticks remained, also the bowsprit. Most of the standing rigging still stood. The long boat was gone, and it must have been its departure that had torn out a good fifteen feet of the larboard gunwale amidships, leaving nothing but splinters. The foremast boom was gone but the sail itself had been saved. The mainsail, too, had been saved; it must have been by a tremendous effort. Both jibs were gone.
John Bond had dislocated his left wrist. Jethro Gardner's right leg had been smashed, badly, while he tussled with the long boat. They were all banged and bruised a good bit.
Adam hiked Lady Maisie's skirt and petticoat down, then went for the key. It took some time, the forecastle being flooded. When he returned, and was releasing her, she nodded toward Jeth Gardner, in a swoon now.
"We must carry him to my cabin. He's a brave man, Adam."
"Aye," said the skipper, who would take such a thing for granted of Jeth Gardner. "Well, now you've seen what the sea can do, you'll understand why we all hate it so."
"La, 'twas exciting," said Maisie.
There, among the perfumes and pomatum, the spikenard and rice powder, where rosewater rocked in its jars, and from a score of pegs silk and satin and flimsy frilled muslin swung with the movement of the schooner. Bosun Gardner lay in a bunk until recently the domain of Resolved Forbes. It was there that Adam broke the news to him.
Likely enough Jeth was expecting it, but this was not the reason why he made it easier to say. Lying there, he had been grumping. Adam would have worried still more about the state of the bosun's health if he hadn't grumped. A Jeth who found the world satisfactory would be a Jeth on the very threshold of extinction.
"Been down here two days and nights now, and you got to get me out, Cap'n. Ain't no place for a man."
Adam grinned.
"What's the matter with this cabin?"
"Might've been all right when you and Mr. Forbes was here, but not now. Oh, she means first-rate! It was chirk of her to think of it, and I appreciate that and all. But I can't stay here."
"What's the matter with this cabin?" Adam asked again.
"Well, for one thing, it stinks."
"Coming from a man who's spent most of his life in forecastles—"
"I'm used to that kind of smell. I ain't used to this—" and he waved his hand to indicate the bottles, the jars.
They were alone. Three would have crowded the place uncomfortably, even indecently if the Honorable Maisie Treadway was one, and the rule was that whenever anybody wanted to visit with the patient, the lady, called down to, would come up first.
Of course they all did visit.
"They ain't fretting about me," the bosun growled. "They just want to get a look at them corsets hanging up there."
"Jeth," Adam said now, "do you think this vessel's under a spell?"
"No, not any more I don't. Did used to. But not since we come through that crazy storm without snapping a stick."
Adam said slowly: "We're losing the services of a cracker jack bosun."
"Not for long. I'll be ramming around again right soon, I expect." He looked up suddenly. "Or won't I?"
That gave Adam an opening in which to say what he had come to say, but it chanced that he wanted a little more palaver first.
"Do you think Lady Maisie's a witch, Jeth?"
"She could be, but I don't think so. You ought to know."
"I don't think so either. But I can see where anybody else might."
"Aye, she's a dreadful attractive female."
"Aye," said Adam.
Jethro hitched himself up in the bunk, or tried to, but gave it up, wincing, when a crash of pain reminded him of his leg.
"That brings me to the other reason I want to get out of here, Cap'n. I'm used to close quarters all right, but not with a woman, and especially a woman like this. Oh, it ain't her fault! She's been mighty kind with me and not pushy. Hangs up a couple of skirts for a curtain whenever she changes any of her clothes, which she's doing just about all the time. Talks to me, to keep me from thinking about things. But I do think about things just the same. Can't help it."
Jethro Gardner actually was blushing.
"It ain't healthy. Don't like to talk about a thing like this, Cap'n. But you understand. It's goldam hard on a man, all the time."
"I understand," said Adam Long.
"That's the other reason why I want to get out."
Adam nodded.
"We'll get you out. Right awav. We were going to anyway."
"Oh?"
Jeth was studying his face. Adam kept looking at the other bunk, his erstwhile own, piled high now with frilly fabrics, ribbons, kerchiefs. That was where she slept.
Jeth paused a moment, so's to be sure of his voice.
"You mean you don't like the way my leg is, then?"
"No, I don't, Jeth. Neither do the others."
"And you reckon we ought to—ought—"
"I think we should, Jeth. That's what the others think, too. They've all looked at it. Course, we won't do it if you don't say go ahead."
"But that's what you think, yourself?"
"Aye."
"Want another look at it?"
"Yes, I do."
A few minutes later: "Still feel that way, Cap'n?"
"I do, Jeth. I truthful do. Down here in this hot climate— And we certainly don't want you to die on us."
"Don't want to die myself, comes to that." He was silent a moment. "There's God's plenty of knives, but what about the bone?"
"I got a saw, in my carpenter's kit."
"Oh—You'll do this yourself, Cap'n? Personally?"
"I wouldn't ask anybody else to."
"No, you wouldn't. That's the way you are. All right—if you're going to do it yourself I'll say go ahead. But I wish you'd sprung it on me, sort of. It'll take some time to hot up an iron."