After the fashion of these gulf storms, this one tarried not in its

coming, nor offered any clemency when it had arrived. Where but a

half-hour since the heavens had been fair, the sea rippling, suave and

kind, now the sky was not visible at all and the tumbling waves about

us rolled savagely as in a nature wholly changed. The wind sang

ominously overhead, as with lift and plunge we drove on into a bank of

mist. A chill as of doom swiftly had replaced the balm of the southern

sky; and forsooth, all the mercy of the world seemed lost and gone.

And as our craft, laboring, thrust forward blindly into this reek,

with naught of comfort on any hand, nor even the dimmest ray of hope

visible from any fixed thing on ahead, in like travail of going, in

like groaning to the very soul, the bark of my life now lay in the

welter, helpless, reft of storm and strife, blind, counseled by no

fixed ray ahead. I know not what purpose remained in me, that, like

the ship which bore us, I still, dumbly and without conscious

purpose, forged onward to some point fixed by reason or desire before

reason and desire had been engulfed by this final unkindness of the

world. For myself, I cared little or none at all. The plunge of the

boat, the shriek of the wind, the wild magic and mystery of it, would

have comported not ill with a strong man's tastes even in hours more

happy, and now, especially, they jumped with the wild protest of a

soul eager for some outlet of action or excitement. But for these

others, these women--this woman--these boys, all brought into this

danger by my own mad folly, ah! when the thought of these arose, a

swift remorse caught me; and though for myself I feared not at all,

for these I feared.

Needs must, therefore, use every cool skilled resource that lay at

hand. No time now for broken hearts to ask attention, the ship must be

sailed. Crippled or not, what she had of help for us must be got out

of her, used, fostered, nourished. All the art of the navigator must

be charged with this duty. We must win through. And, as many a man who

has seen danger will testify, the great need brought to us all a great

calm and a steady precision in that which needed doing.

I saw Peterson at the wheel, wet to the skin, as now and again a

seventh wave, slow, portentous, deadly-deliberate, showed ahead of us,

advanced, reared and pounded down on us with its tons of might. But he

only shook the brine from his eyes and held her up, waiting for the

slow pulse of our crippled engine to come on.




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