Josiah knew nothing of his death for some months, for he was at sea in the Constellation with Truxtun. Josiah could remember with peculiar vividness those early battles, with the Insurgente and the Vengeance. He could remember as well the color and the heat and the rain of the West India islands where Truxtun had displayed the Stars and Stripes — the memories were a little overlaid by others, of Tripoli and Algiers and Malta, but they were still keen enough. He found himself wondering whether he would see those islands again, and then checked himself with a hard smile, for he was under orders to proceed there at present. The immediate problem of weathering Montauk Point and breaking the British blockade had for the moment driven the equally difficult problems of the future clean out of his head. But it was as well that he could smile — most of the times when his weakness had lured him into going back over old memories he could not smile at all.
He shook himself, now that the spell was broken, back into his proper state of mind. He lifted the traverse board into the dim light of the binnacle — he realized that he must have been standing on deck motionless during two or three hours. The Delaware had held her course steadily during those hours, and must be well out into the Sound now. New Haven must be on their larboard beam. He could feel his way about Long Island Sound as surely as he could about his own cabin, thanks to his years in the Coast Guard Service and to further years commanding one of the gunboats on which Mr. Jefferson had lavished so much of the national income in an attempt to buy security cheap.
The sea had been a second mother to him, and a kinder one than the traditional stepmother had ever been, he reflected, in an unusually analytical mood. The Navy had been his father. Then to continue the analogy the Delaware must be his wife, to whom he devoted all his kindly care and all his waking thoughts. He was more fortunate in his family than most men were. . . . He struggled again against this dangerous bit of brooding. He knew that with advancing age came a tendency to dwell upon the past. Perhaps now that he was thirty-two — close on thirty-three — he was beginning to show signs of it. Realistically he remembered how, as a lieutenant of sixteen, he had looked upon men of twice his age as "old"; and captains especially so. Truxtun in the Constellation had seemed almost senile, but then Truxtun must have been in his forties or so. On the other hand Decatur was the same age as himself, practically, and Decatur still seemed young to him. Perhaps, after all, he was not so very old at thirty-two. It was a satisfactory conclusion to reach, especially while he was the most junior captain in the list and while his country's freedom had still to be defended — and while this very night he had to break a blockade enforced by a squadron of ships of the line.
Enough of this nonsense. He turned to face the snow-covered deck, and was surprised to find that he could hardly move; the bitter cold of the blizzard had stiffened him to such an extent that, now that his attention was called to it, he walked with difficulty. As the Delaware heeled before the shrieking wind, his feet slipped in the treacherous snow, and he slid away to leeward and cannoned into the bulwarks, his feet struggling to find a foothold in the scuppers. That was the penalty for dreaming, he told himself grimly as he rubbed his bruises. Uncontrollable shudders shook his body, and his teeth were chattering. It was ridiculous that he should have allowed himself to grow so cold. He struggled up the deck again to the weather side and under the slight shelter of the bulwark there he flogged himself with his arms, beating off the thick layer of snow which had accumulated on the breast of his pea-jacket. He trudged forward along the spar deck to get his circulation going again; the foremast shrouds on the weather side here were coated completely with ice — the frozen spray taken in over the weather bow — so that shrouds and ratlines were like the frames of windows of ice, hard to see in this shrieking darkness but plain enough to the touch. A fresh shower of spray blew into his face as he felt about him; there must be a good deal of ice accumulating on the running rigging. Certainly the anchor at the cathead was welded to the ship's side by a solid block of ice.
He made his way aft again.
"Mr. Murray!"
"Sir!" said the officer of the watch.
"Set the watch to work clearing away the ice. I want twenty hands clearing the running rigging."
"Aye aye, sir."
Even with the gale blowing he could hear a few yelps of dismay among the crew as Murray gave his orders. To lay aloft in the blizzard was to face a torture as exquisite as anything the Indians had ever devised and there would be frostbite among the crew after this, even if no one broke his neck struggling along the frozen footropes with a precarious hold on the ice-coated yards. Yet it had to be done. The whole safety of the ship depended upon his ability to handle her promptly and to let go the anchor if necessary. His calculations of her course and run might be faulty. He might find Orient Point close under his lee, when he really intended to give it a wide berth, and the knowledge that he might not be completely infallible gnawed at his conscience. Because of that, he stayed out on the exposed deck where the blizzard could work its will on him. If the men had to suffer because he could not be sure of his position to within a quarter of a mile, he was going to suffer with them; Peabody was not aware of how deeply ingrained into him was the Old Testament teaching of the father whom he had grown to despise.
Something white over the starboard quarter caught his eye — a fleck too big to be a mere breaking wave. He rushed across the deck to look more closely. There it was again — something white in the hurtling gray of the snow. He sprang up into the mizzen rigging, with the wind shrieking round his ears and the sea hissing beneath his feet. That white fleck was the spray about the bows of a ship. As he leaped back again to the deck he found Murray there — Murray had seen it, too. Murray stabbed at the darkness with a gloved hand and shouted in his ear, even grabbing his shoulder in the excitement of the moment, for Murray was of an excitable temperament. It was a ship, close-hauled under storm canvas on the opposite tack to the Delaware. She was close abreast of them. She would cross their stern within a yard of them, Peabody decided; near enough. The bowsprit and martingale which circled in the air under their noses were coated with ice, he noted. Through the snow he could see the curve of her bow with two broad stripes of paint and a double line of checkers — a twodecker, then: Hardy's Ramillies or Cochrane's Superb.
"A Britisher!" shrieked Murray, quite unnecessarily. There were no United States ships of the line. Murray turned away towards the helmsman and then back to his captain for orders, quite unduly excited. There was nothing to be done. The ships were passing rapidly, and Peabody could be certain that the British guns, like his own, were secured by double breechings. By the time a gun could be loaded and run out the ships would be invisible to each other again; but Murray did not possess the imperturbability of his captain or his fatalist ability to accept the inevitable.
Already the twodecker was passing rapidly — a well-thrown stone would have landed on her deck. The glimmering snow with which she was coated showed up faintly in the darkness; against the whitened decks Peabody thought he could see the dark forms of her officers and crew. The poor devils were having as miserable a time of it as were his own men — worse, probably. Beating about Long Island Sound in a New England blizzard was no child's play, especially in a clumsy, pig-headed ship of the line; Peabody remembered how bluff and inelegant had been the bows she had presented to him when he first caught sight of her. Now she was gone, engulfed in the darkness. She might put about in pursuit, but it did not matter. At a hundred yards the ships were as invisible to each other as at a hundred miles, and by the time the twodecker could go about and settle on her new course she would be a couple of miles at least astern. It was even likely that she had not recognized the Delaware as American — there were few enough American frigates and those all strictly blockaded. It was one of the ironies of history that the last vessel one would expect to see in Long Island Sound was an American frigate.