Part 18

“Yes, sir!” I replied, for when he used that tone to me “Yes, sir” was the only thing to say. I stuck my head out of my porthole watching the phosphorus in the water make the sea look as if it were on fire until I became too sleepy to sit up. I got my family of cats from the chartroom and put them under the blankets at my feet. Under the covers their eyes looked just as the phosphorus in the water did. I mention those kittens because they played a big part in the “trouble” Father had predicted. He had always forbidden me to take the cats into my bunk.

“Bedbugs and cockroaches can’t be avoided in bunks but cats can be, so don’t you let me catch you taking them to bed with you.”

I put my own interpretation on that advice. I couldn’t catch the bedbugs and roaches but I could catch the cats. I kept them under the covers so their protesting meowing wouldn’t reach Father’s ears. Then I fell sound asleep. I was wakened by a heavy rain squall and stiff wind which shook the ship. I lay in my bunk listening to the seas slap the porthole above me. I heard Father shouting above the wind to the crew, and faintly the answering calls of men came back. Shallow water when it becomes rough rocks a ship unlike a deep sea storm. The difference in the rolling made me peer out the porthole. A sudden jolt of the ship threw me flat on the bunk. If only that wind would blow steadily and not in jerks—but I was asleep before I could form any more opinions.

I don’t know how long I was asleep before I awoke in a fit of coughing. My eyes burned. I rubbed them with my fist but they watered and stung more. I quit rubbing them but they hurt even more and then I could hardly breathe. It was pitch dark in my cabin and I thought I was having a nightmare. My senses began to dim and I felt as if I were going a long way off from my body. The scuffling of feet on the poop deck—hoarse shouts—confusion, then a cry that pierced my dulled brain sent a chill of fear through me.

“Fire!”

“Fire! Fire!” The words were repeated and echoed hollowly in the wind. “Fire!” That was what I was thinking the phosphorus in the sea looked like. I tried to wake up. Surely I was dreaming.

“It’s in the after-hold.”

“The paint locker is burning!”

I couldn’t move from my bunk for I was paralyzed with fear. Over and over in my fast dimming consciousness I could hear “Paint Locker.” “Fire!” The curses of the men above grew faint. I could feel the kittens scratching under the covers at my feet to get out but I could make no effort to help them. Had there been a light in my cabin I would have seen the dense smoke choking the air—slowly suffocating me. Why couldn’t I move? Why didn’t some one help me? But too well I knew the code of the sea that reckons one life as little where the safety of the ship is concerned.

The floors of the cabin were caulked with tar and oakum. Fire from below had burned the underpinnings and the tar was boiling in the cracks.

On deck Father opened the lazarette hatch and flames six feet high burst out. The cargo of copra in the hold was a blazing inferno! Copra is highly explosive. The rubbing and grating of the stuff in the freak storm had caused spontaneous combustion. The flames licked up from out the open hatch and overcame the mate. Father’s face was burned, and his hands blistered. The wind swept down into the hold and fanned the fire into a vicious furnace.

I finally managed to get out of my bunk and found my way by groping through the smoke to the chartroom. I could smell where the companionway was by the rush of fresh air that poured down from it. But the air only served to fan the gasping licks of fire that had eaten up through the cabin floor into a blaze. I tried to reach the companionway door. Clad only in a flour sack nightgown and in my bare feet I picked my way over the hot tar on the floor to the ladder leading to the deck. Then I remembered the kittens I had left to smother under the covers in my bunk.

I felt my way back to the cabin and blindly reached for them. I found them huddled in the farthest corner of the bunk. The ship gave a sudden toss and sent me sprawling to the floor with my arm full of kittens. They dug their claws into my bare flesh and held on. I tried to get back to the companionway, but the fire had eaten through from below. I stood on the edge of the chartroom unable to go farther. My feet were burned and the pain was almost more than I could bear. The smoke choked me. It stung and burned my eyes. The kittens were clawing at the raw flesh around my breasts.

The realization that I was going to die seemed a relief. I became calm. If I died, the terrible pain would stop. I stood perfectly still, just waiting, for I couldn’t move another step.

On deck pandemonium had broken loose. The sails slapped and ripped. The deserted helm spun dizzily around leaving the ship at the mercy of the choppy sea. Then, from what seemed millions of miles away, I heard an agonized cry. I recognized the voice of Stitches:

“Joan?”

I tried to answer him, but all I could manage was a whispered, “Here I am.”

“Joan! Skipper! Where are you?”

Oh, wouldn’t he ever find me! I couldn’t help myself. Smoke and pain and panic overcame me. I couldn’t speak another word. I heard his voice coming nearer—and then a numbness crept over me so that I hardly knew what was happening. Stitches came down the companionway from the forward entrance and into the dining saloon. Finally his arms found me and my cats. Picking me up in his old arms he carried me over and out of the fire which was licking up in scarlet tongues of flame all over the deck of the cabins.

Just as he reached the top of the companionway ladder Stitches dropped with a gasp under me. We struck the deck and lay there side by side. Then the sight of the sky, the wind and rain on my face, the fresh air in my lungs brought me to. I staggered to my feet, and bending over tried to arouse Stitches. He was dead! He had crowned the years of his devotion by giving his life to save mine. He had done his job the best he knew how and he would go under the waves with his ship for his coffin—a sailorman found his last anchorage! No matter how long I live Stitches will be a memory of the sea that nothing will erase.

I could see they were lowering the lifeboat off the stern. I caught Stitches’ body under the arms and tried to drag it to the poop deck. Swede saw me.

Rushing over he jerked me from Stitches, dragged me to the poop deck and flung me into the lifeboat.

On the poop deck by the spanker mast were two kegs of gasoline used for starting the donkey engine forward to hoist cargo in port. They were lashed to the deck with chains. If the fire reached them the ship and every one on board would be blown to bits. They were lashed too securely to be chopped away in time to save them from the fire which had already eaten through to the poop. There wasn’t a second to be lost.

“Pull away to leeward, then head for the lightship,” shouted Father. He didn’t even stop to see if his command was carried out. He and the mate and two of the sailors were bailing up canvas bucket after canvas bucket of sea water to throw on the fire.

The ship began to fill with water from the open scuttles. The weight of the sea water in the hold sank the vessel deeper, but it forced the fire up through the decks. The _Minnie A. Caine_ wallowed like a stricken thing under the vast weight of water. I worked back to a place in the stern of the dinghy. Then I discovered the cats were still clinging to me. Afterwards I found they had sunk their claws deep in my flesh. At the time I scarcely noticed the pain.

Father and the mate stayed on the poop deck until the burning vessel sunk to the water line when they plunged overboard, jumping clear of the hull. The ship tossed by a big swell capsized over on its beam ends. A hissing, bubbling sound came from her as the flames were buried in the sea. Father and the mate swam to the lifeboat which was leaking badly. The tropic heat had warped the seams in it and it was filling faster than we could bail it out. The rain, the spray from the waves and the thick smoke from the smothered fire made vision impossible. I could barely see the other figures in the lifeboat. The men pulled long strokes towards the shore.

We were about a hundred yards away from the ship and through the maze of smoke all we could see were the topmasts sticking above the sea. The wind was freezing and the cold rain wet us through and through. My nightgown was poor protection against the wind and water, but I was so terrified I wasn’t conscious that I was nearly freezing.

“Pull! Pull! Pull!” Father’s voice set the beat for the men at the oars.

“Are all hands here?” he asked. Swede, Bulgar, Oleson, the mate, cabin-boy, Johnson and me were the only ones to answer the roll call. The Jap cook had jumped overboard and failed to make the lifeboat. Stitches’ charred body was somewhere cradled in the burnt hull of the ship. Over the roar of the wind and rain the buoys kept up their monotonous warnings—and shorewards the riding light of the light ship traced semi-circles against the sky as her masts rolled heavily in the onshore breakers. We were about a quarter mile away from the wreck when the smoke cleared. Father gazed back at his ship, which looked like some glorious living thing struck dead. It was too much for Father to endure. With a gurgling sound of agony in his throat he pulled in his oar:

“O Christ!” I heard him gasp. Then he stood up, trying to plunge into the sea and return to his beloved ship. Only the strong restraining arms of Swede and Oleson kept him back. He struggled like a maniac.

“Let me go, you ——s. Let me go!” he cried.

In this crisis the mate, Johnson, saved Father and us.

“The lifeboat’s sinking, Captain,” he said.

Those words brought Father out of his frenzy of grief at losing his ship. For the first time in my life I saw Father cry. He covered his eyes with his hands as if to shut out the sight. The weight of our bodies in the life boat opened up the already leaking seams.

Father reached through the rain to where I crouched in the stern and grabbed my arm. In a voice that became suddenly calm—he was once more the master in command, he said:

“Joan! Swim for it, kid,—the lightship.” He pointed to the pin point of light which was about three miles away. “Swim slowly and high out of water. And breathe deep, Joan, as deep as you can.”

“Yes, sir!” I answered, trying to hide the terror of the long swim.

“If you get all in—float. Take it easy, girl. I’ll be right behind you.”

He had only time to finish those words when the lifeboat filled with water up to the gunwales. If I had to swim no nightgown was going to get in my way to drag me down. I tore it from me, but the drenched kittens still clung to my flesh. I filled my lungs with a deep breath and jumped out of the lifeboat. When I came up in the choppy sea I was conscious of only the pain caused by the salt water on my bleeding cuts and scratches. Each stroke I took was like a knife cut, and I couldn’t shake the drowning kittens off. Perhaps to those cats I owe my life, for the pain made me so mad I fought on and on, toward the lightship which seemed to go farther away instead of closer. I could hear the others swimming near me, just the “cut-splash—cut-splash!” of their strokes. I had swum about a mile against a high running sea with the cats on my back. I was exhausted, so I trod water and drank the fresh rain that poured down. That is a trick for deep sea swimming—to drink rain water which absorbs the salt water that is swallowed.

Two of the men, Swede and Johnson, were ahead of me. Swede began a song. It was his bravery, his daring to sing in the face of near death that put courage into me. If Swede could sing then I could hold out too, for wasn’t I a regular sailor, and here was a supreme test.

I plowed on through the seas. I thought I had been swimming hours, when Father’s voice a few yards abreast me called:

“Just ahead now—there she looms!”

That was all I remembered until the next morning at daybreak. I came to on the iron deck of the lightship with only a man’s vest on my naked torn body. A strange man was bending over me. He turned out to be the keeper of the lightship.

“She must be a damn fine swimmer because young things is hard to kill.”

He lifted me off the deck and carried me to his warm cabin where I lost consciousness again. The cats were gone! Somewhere in that last quarter mile they were lost.

Late that afternoon I awoke. The engineer of the lightship gave me a warm suit of dungarees and a heavy sweater to wear, and then we learned what had happened. The look-out on the lightship had seen the fire on board. He attempted to launch a small boat to come to rescue us when the Southerly Buster squall arose and made the feat impossible. He and his men watched from the crow’s nest on the mast all night through. They saw the ship capsize. Through powerful binoculars they scanned the sea for a sign of us in our lifeboat. At almost daybreak Swede and Oleson reached the lightship, then followed Johnson, the cabin-boy and Bulgar. Swede swam back to get me and he dragged my limp body to the lightship. The lightship keeper threw over a running bowline which Swede made fast around my stomach and back and they hoisted me on deck. Father and the mate were the last to be pulled aboard.

We stayed on the lightship for three days. Father couldn’t speak. He stood by the rail for hours at a time just staring out towards the sea. He refused food. I tried to talk with him but he didn’t hear me.

“From a skipper to a bum!—I’m through forever now,” he finally said, more to the sea than to any person, as the Government cutter from Melbourne steamed alongside the light ship to take us ashore, in answer to the S.O.S. call sent by the lightship Keeper.

And Father _was_ through too. The day of steam ships has come. Old sailing captains have no place any longer. My father was seventy years old, and broken by the wreck. He is living ashore now, near the coast on the Pacific, but his spirit is not on the land—it is far off in the tropics dreaming of a fair wind and the stars of the Southern Cross to steer a course by.

[Illustration]

[Illustration] THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

Book cover is placed in the public domain.