As she placed her hands on the spokes he went forward and lowered the sail. There were two lines of reef points in the section of canvas and Dan took in both. When he hoisted it again there was just a patch of three-cornered sail.
Within half an hour it was raining hard. The wind was increasing slowly but surely, and the sea was rising. Dan asked the girl to go into the cabin and to remain there either until the storm was over, or he summoned her. She obeyed him partially. She went into the cabin, but returned quickly with two slickers.
"Do you suppose," she cried, "I am going to let you be alone now? I am going to help you, and, if it must be, to die with you. I am not a bit afraid any more."
"Get down here, then, under the lee of this cabin. We are not going to die. At least not yet a while."
So the storm came. With his patch of sail Dan had headed the craft up into the wind; and thus, with the boat already beginning to rise and fall, with the broad bow groaning, and oozing ends of planking, and dirty water, and the deck, contracting and expanding like the belly of a stricken whale, he settled down to the long fight.
The fog had all departed now. North, east, south, and west, nothing but the gray of onrushing waves and a shrouded sky as implacable as the morning of doom. Darkness was falling swiftly. Soon the terrible night began.
Not that it was the worst storm in which Dan had ever been, but certainly he had never faced North Atlantic tumult under such a disadvantage, under conditions so desperately precarious. The bow rose but heavily to the seas, and never topped them. The water rushing over, poured down the deck in mill-races, filling it to the rails, occasionally springing up over the poop and the top of the after cabin, lashing the faces of the two crouching at the wheel behind it.
"It's a sou'easter, I'm almost certain," roared Dan in the girl's ear. "It will work up to a climax gradually, and then gradually go down, at this season of the year. Don't be afraid of the water. We can't sink, I believe; the only danger is that we might break up--and we won't do that."
But despite the optimism of his words, Dan was not altogether certain that the wallowing wreck would hold together. There was nothing to do but wait and see. The situation he grasped in all its grievous details. He had never been so happy, so utterly at peace as aboard this derelict. No gilded barge of antiquity had ever been so glorious, so golden as this mangled wraith of the seas in the sunlit hours of the immediate past. Her voice, her laughter, had filled them with music, her presence with all the poetry and romance of the world, and the light in her eyes shining for him alone had filled him with a great tenderness.