mainsail, emptied of the wind and feeling the wind on the other side,
swung crazily across above him. He cleared the danger of the mainsheet
with a wild leap (although no less wild had been Van Horn's leap to
rescue him), and found himself directly under the mainboom with the huge
sail looming above him as if about to fall upon him and crush him.

It was Jerry's first experience with sails of any sort. He did not know
the beasts, much less the way of them, but, in his vivid recollection,
when he had been a tiny puppy, burned the memory of the hawk, in the
middle of the compound, that had dropped down upon him from out of the
sky. Under that colossal threatened impact he crouched down to the deck.
Above him, falling upon him like a bolt from the blue, was a winged hawk
unthinkably vaster than the one he had encountered. But in his crouch
was no hint of cower. His crouch was a gathering together, an assembling
of all the parts of him under the rule of the spirit of him, for the
spring upward to meet in mid career this monstrous, menacing thing.

But, the succeeding fraction of a moment, so that Jerry, leaping, missed
even the shadow of it, the mainsail, with a second crash of blocks on
traveller, had swung across and filled on the other tack.

Van Horn had missed nothing of it. Before, in his time, he had seen
young dogs frightened into genuine fits by their first encounters with
heaven-filling, sky-obscuring, down-impending sails. This was the first
dog he had seen leap with bared teeth, undismayed, to grapple with the
huge unknown.

With spontaneity of admiration, Van Horn swept Jerry from the deck and
gathered him into his arms.

CHAPTER III

Jerry quite forgot Meringe for the time being. As he well remembered,
the hawk had been sharp of beak and claw. This air-flapping, thunder-
crashing monster needed watching. And Jerry, crouching for the spring
and ever struggling to maintain his footing on the slippery, heeling
deck, kept his eyes on the mainsail and uttered low growls at any display
of movement on its part.

The _Arangi_ was beating out between the coral patches of the narrow
channel into the teeth of the brisk trade wind. This necessitated
frequent tacks, so that, overhead, the mainsail was ever swooping across
from port tack to starboard tack and back again, making air-noises like
the swish of wings, sharply rat-tat-tatting its reef points and loudly
crashing its mainsheet gear alo