“But what would you do, Mr. Pike, with a green crew like this, if you were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread?”
He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an earthquake with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head from both sides of a street.
“Do?” Miss West answered for him. “We’d get the sail off. Oh, it can be done, Mr. Pathurst, with any kind of a crew. If it couldn’t, I should have been drowned long ago.”
“Sure,” Mr. Pike upheld her. “So would I.”
“The officers can perform miracles with the most worthless sailors, in a pinch,” Miss West went on.
Again Mr. Pike nodded his head and agreed, and I noted his two big paws, relaxed the moment before and drooping over the rail, quite unconsciously tensed and folded themselves into fists. Also, I noted fresh abrasions on the knuckles. Miss West laughed heartily, as from some recollection.
“I remember one time when we sailed from San Francisco with a most hopeless crew. It was in the _Lallah Rookh_—you remember her, Mr. Pike?”
“Your father’s fifth command,” he nodded. “Lost on the West Coast afterwards—went ashore in that big earthquake and tidal wave. Parted her anchors, and when she hit under the cliff, the cliff fell on her.”
“That’s the ship. Well, our crew seemed mostly cow-boys, and bricklayers, and tramps, and more tramps than anything else. Where the boarding-house masters got them was beyond imagining. A number of them were shanghaied, that was certain. You should have seen them when they were first sent aloft.” Again she laughed. “It was better than circus clowns. And scarcely had the tug cast us off, outside the Heads, when it began to blow up and we began to shorten down. And then our mates performed miracles. You remember Mr. Harding—Silas Harding?”
“Don’t I though!” Mr. Pike proclaimed enthusiastically. “He was some man, and he must have been an old man even then.”
“He was, and a terrible man,” she concurred, and added, almost reverently: “And a wonderful man.” She turned her face to me. “He was our mate. The men were sea-sick and miserable and green. But Mr. Harding got the sail off the _Lallah Rookh_ just the same. What I wanted to tell you was this:
“I was on the poop, just like I am now, and Mr. Harding had a lot of those miserable sick men putting gaskets on the main-lower-topsail. How far would that be above the deck, Mr. Pike?”