the dark afore you’d know it and you’d get whirled in----”
“And even so, Sammie--do you believe she’d draw us under?”
“Wouldn’t she? If you didn’t cut quick enough, say. And if she didn’t, you’d be caught aback, and in this breeze you’d capsize in a wink. No, ’twon’t do, Skipper. If we’ve got to go, we got to go, and you goin’ with us won’t help. And there’s nine of us and twenty-seven of you.” He looked all about him then--ahead, abeam, aloft, and once more astern at Crump. “So long, fellows, if we’re not here in the mornin’.” Two sharp slashes and the line parted; wide apart fell the big bark and the little schooner.
Crump, immediately he felt himself free, laid the _Buccaneer_ alongside as near the bark as he dared, and he could dare a great deal.
“No more than she is now, Sam. And if ever she should go down, tell the fellows to lash themselves to something or other that’ll float high, and we’ll be right there and maybe pick some of you up----”
Sam waved, the last time they were able to see so much as a hand waved ere black night rolled down on them.
From the little schooner all hands watched the night out for that spot in the darkness where they conceived the bark to be--that is, those that had time to spare from their work. Occasionally they could catch from her deck a call that they knew to be the voice of Sam with his word of cheer. They saw the attempts to light torches on her, the flash and flare, and then the almost immediate dousing when the sea washed aboard.
But fortune attends the brave. She was there in the morning, rolling worse than ever and lower in the water, but still afloat.
“Now, ain’t that amazin’?” demanded Crump of one after another of his crew. “Ain’t it amazin’?” he demanded of the captain of the bark.
That intriguing party could only shake his head at the miracle of it. “Still afloat! And when I left her I give her about an hour. I set her afire myself with my own hand,” he explained, “so nobody’d be misled into tryin’ to save her. ‘No salvage on _her_,’ I said. ‘Another hour and she’ll be burned to the water’s edge, and then she’ll sink and trouble nobody no more,’ I said. And a good job I thought it was, she was that dangerous-lookin’. And if I’d never set a match to her, she was leakin’ that bad, and that low in the water! And there she is still afloat! Well, that’s past me.”