On the alert but motionless, the four boys waited for a repetition of the strange noise, wondering what it meant. The wind still shrieked; all the pandemonium of sound continued, but the queer sound was not repeated, neither was the unusual jar.
Kenneth was the first to move. He jumped to the companionway, and pushed at the hinged doors leading on deck, but they did not move. Glued with the frost, they refused to open. He put his shoulder against them, and pushed with all his might. The expected happened—the doors opened suddenly, and Kenneth found himself sprawling on the floor of the cockpit. He skinned his shin on the brass-bound step of the companionway ladder, and his funny bone tingled from a blow it got on the deck. The boy tried to rise to his feet, but a sudden swing of the boat made him slip on the icy boards and fall swiftly down again. From his prone position, he looked around him. The light coming up through the open companionway gleamed yellow on the ice-coated, glistening boom, and the furled sail propped up in the crotch. As Ransom’s eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw what it was that had startled them all. “His Nibs,” hauled up on the narrow strip of deck aft of the rudder post, had slipped when the “Gazelle” had made a sudden plunge, and sliding on the icy rail had thumped into the cockpit. Perfectly safe, but ludicrously out of place, the little boat looked like a big St. Bernard in a lady’s lap.
“Look!” the prostrate captain called to his friends. “‘His Nibs’ was getting lonesome and was coming down into the cabin for the sake of sociability.”
The other three crawled on deck, having learned caution through the skipper’s mishap, and crouched in the wet, slippery cockpit while they looked around.
The gale, still increasing rather than abating, was raising tremendous seas. The “Gazelle” rolled, her rails under at times, and her bowsprit jabbed the white-capped waves.
“I am going forward to see if the anchors are O. K.” Kenneth spoke loudly enough, but the wind snatched the words from his mouth and the boys did not hear what he said.
Ransom managed to get on his feet, and, grasping the beading of the cabin, he pulled himself erect. A quick lurch almost threw him overboard, but he reached up and grabbed the boom overhead just in time. Holding on to this with both arms, he slowly worked himself forward.
The other boys, crouching in the cockpit, wondered what he was up to. They watched his dim figure crawling painfully along, and once their hearts came into their throats as, his feet slipping from under him, he hung for an instant from the icy boom almost directly over the raging river. The light streaming from the cabin shone into their strained, anxious faces and blinded them so that they could hardly see the figure of “Ken,” on whom they had learned to rely. At last he disappeared altogether behind the mast and was swallowed up in the blackness.
“Ken! Come back! Come back!” Arthur, who was still weak, could not stand the strain; he could not bear to think of what might happen to his friend.
The wind shrieked in derision—so, at least, it seemed to the anxious boy—the elements combined to drown his voice. The gale howled on; the rain froze as it fell, and the waves dashed at the boys like fierce dogs foaming at the mouth.
Frank, at last feeling that he must know what had become of Ransom, sprang up, and grasping the icy spar, crept forward. Many times he lost his foothold, but always managed somehow to catch himself in time. Slipping and sliding, fighting the gale, he reached the mast. The journey was one of only twenty feet, but the gale was so fierce and the exertion of keeping his footing so great that he arrived at the end of it out of breath and almost exhausted. It was inky black, and only with difficulty could he distinguish the familiar objects on the forecastle—the bitts, and the two rigid anchor cables leading from it. Lying across them was Kenneth, gripping one, while the yacht’s bow rose and fell, dashing the spray clear over his prostrate figure.
“What’s the matter, Ken?” Frank shouted, so as to be heard above the wind. “Are you hurt? Brace up, old man!”
The other did not speak for a minute; then he answered in a strained voice: “Give me a hand, old chap, will you? I’ve hurt my foot—wrenched it, I guess; pains like blazes.”
That he was pretty badly hurt, Frank guessed by the way in which he drew in his breath as he shifted his position.
“Got a good hold there, Frank? Grab those halliards. It’s terrible slippery—Ouch! Easy, now.”
It was a difficult job that Frank had in hand. The ice-covered decks could not be depended on at all; if the boys began to slide, they would slip right off the sloping cabin roof into the water; the boat was jumping on the choppy seas like a bucking horse, and the wind blew with hurricane force. Kenneth could help himself hardly at all, and Frank struggled with him till the sweat stood out on his brow in great beads. At last both got over the entangling anchor cables, and breathing hard, hugged the stick as if their lives depended on it, which came very near being the case.
“You—had—better—leave—me—here—old—chap,” panted Kenneth. “My—ankle—hurts—like—the—old—Harry. Can’t—travel—much.”
“What did you do to it?”
“Got—caught—under—cleat—on—the butt—of—the—bowsprit.”
“Gee! that’s tough!” sympathized Frank.
“Gave it a terrible wrench. Regular monkey wrench.” It was a grim situation to joke about.
“Leave you here?” said Frank, coming back to Ken’s suggestion. “I guess not! What do you take me for, anyway? I know how to work it, all right. You hang on to the mast a minute.”
Releasing his grip on Ransom, Chauvet picked up the end of the peak halliard coiled at his feet, and with great difficulty straightened out its frozen turns, for he had but one free hand—he could not release his hold on the sailhoop that he grasped for an instant. Taking the stiff line, he passed it around his body and then around the boom. Holding on by his legs to the mast, he worked away at the frozen line until he had knotted the end to the main part—made a bowline. The loop was around his waist and the boom.
“Now, Ken, we’re all right—I have lashed myself to this spar, and my hands are free. I’ll yell to Clyde,” and suiting the action to the word he shouted aft.
Ransom hung on to the line about Frank’s waist, while Frank half held, half supported him. Slowly they moved along, stumbling, often swinging with the boat, till the rope cut into Chauvet’s body cruelly. It was exhausting work.
Soon Clyde came stumbling, slipping and fighting forward against the gale, and in a minute was helping Frank to support the gritty captain.
It was a thankful group that dropped into the warm, bright cabin—dripping wet and numbed with cold, out of breath, well-nigh exhausted, but thankful to the heart’s core.
Arthur cut the shoe from Ransom’s swelling ankle, and then bound it tightly with a cloth saturated with witch hazel.
“Chasing anchors on stormy nights seems to be fatal for me,” Kenneth remarked, as he lay on his bunk regarding his bandaged foot. “I’ll give you fellows a chance next time—I don’t want to be piggish about it.”
Presently the cabin light was turned down and all hands got into their berths. Not a tongue moved, but brains were active; not an eyelid felt heavy, but the boys resolutely kept them closed. The storm raged on; gust succeeded gust, the rain beat down on the thin cabin roof with increasing fierceness. It was a trying night, and each of the four boys was glad enough to see the gray light come stealing in through the frosted port lights. They had all thought that they would never see daylight again, though each had kept his fears to himself.
The wind still roared and the rain poured down, but the yacht tossed and rolled less violently; her movements were slower and sluggish, quite unlike those of the usually sprightly, light “Gazelle.”
“Sea must have gone down,” commented Clyde, in a casual way, as he noted that the others were awake. “Queer, wind’s blowing great guns, too.”
Kenneth sat up suddenly and bumped his head on the deck beam above. This made him wince, and he drew his game foot suddenly against the boat’s side. Kenneth made so wry a face that his friends could not help laughing outright—an honest laugh, in spite of the sympathy they felt.
“Both ends at once.” The captain tried to rub his head and his ankle at the same moment, and found it a good deal of a stretch.
“There is a new bar to be charted here.” His finger went gingerly round the bump on his forehead.
“Frank, go on deck, will you, and see if things are moderating. I’d like to get into some cove or another.”
Chauvet made his way to the ladder and shoved the doors with all his might; but it was only after repeated blows with a heavy rope fender that they opened.
“Great Scott!” he shouted. “Look here. Ice! Why, there’s no boat left—it’s all ice! Well, I’ll be switched—why, we’ll have to chop her out, or she’ll sink with the weight of it—she’s down by the head now.”
Fresh exclamations of amazement followed as each head appeared in turn from below. It was true. The yacht was literally covered with ice, from one to six inches thick at the bow, where the spray combined with the rain to add to the layers of white coating. The sluggish movement of the vessel was explained—the weight of the ice burdened her. Here was a pleasing condition of things.
The boys snatched a hasty breakfast, and taking hatchets, hammers—anything with a sharp edge—they attacked the ice. Even Ransom insisted upon taking a hand. The boat was very beautiful in her glassy coating. The rigging, fringed with icicles, and the cold, gray light shining on the polished surface, made it look like a dull jewel. The boys, however, saw nothing of the beautiful side of it. There was a mighty job before them; a cold, hard, dangerous job, and they went at it as they had done with all the previous difficulties which they had encountered—with courage and energy.
Colder and colder it grew, until the thermometer registered five degrees below zero. The yacht still rolled and pitched so that the boys found it necessary to lash themselves to mast, spars and rigging while they chopped. The spray flew up and dashed into their faces and almost instantly froze; the sleeves of their coats became as hard and as stiff as iron pipes, and their hands stiffened so that the fingers could not hold the axe helves. Every few minutes one or the other would have to stop, go below and thaw out. They worked desperately, but new layers of frost formed almost as fast as the boys could hack it off. But chop and shovel they must or sink in plain sight of the town, inaccessible as though the boat were miles from shore.
How they ever lived through the three days during which the storm continued, God, who saved them, alone knows. It seemed almost a miracle that so small a craft should have lived through what it did.
When at the end of the weary time the wind subsided, the yacht rode over the choppy waves in much the same buoyant way as before—she was weather proof; but her crew was utterly exhausted; hands and faces were cut and bleeding from the fierce onslaught of the sleet-laden wind; fingers, toes and ears were frost-bitten, innumerable bruises—true badges of honor—covered their bodies, and the captain suffered intolerably from his injured ankle.
“Hours chopping ice off the ‘Gazelle’ to keep her from sinking under the weight of it,” quoted Kenneth from the entry in his log. “And this in the heart of the ‘Sunny South.’”
“I don’t believe there is any ‘Sunny South.’” Clyde was tired out, and his sentiments expressed his condition.
“Remember the old coon at Natchez?” said Frank. “He must have been a twin of Methuselah; he said he had never seen ice on the river so far south before, and he had lived on the Mississippi all his life.”
It was many, many hours before the “Gazelle” was free enough of her burden to allow the crew to rest; and not until three days of gale had spent its spite upon them could she be got under way and anchored in a sheltered spot.
After sending reassuring letters to anxious ones at home, the “Gazelle” sped southward, seeking for a sheltered spot to lie by and allow the ice which was sure to follow to pass by.
At the little town of St. Gabriels the “Gazelle” found a snug nest, where, for a time, the ice ceased from troubling, and she floated secure.
It was with a grateful heart that Kenneth rose on Sunday morning, February 19th, and from the safe anchorage saw the great cakes of ice go racing by on the swift current.
“We can’t hold a service aboard,” he said to Arthur, who appeared on deck about the same time. “But let’s dress ship for a thanksgiving offering.”
All four agreed with alacrity, and for the next hour scarcely a word was spoken except as one fellow sung out, “Where is that swab?” or another, “Who’s got the bath-brick?” Hardly a day passed (except when the boat was in actual danger) that the “Gazelle” did not get a thorough cleaning—brasses shined, decks scrubbed, cabin scoured, bedding aired, dishes well washed and even the dishcloth cleaned and spread to dry. But this was a special day, and the yacht was as sweet within as soap and water, elbow grease and determined wills could make her. The crowning of the work came when the “Gazelle” was decked in her colors; the flags spelling her name in the international code fluttering in the breeze, and above all............