when it
comes, holds menacing possibilities.

"They knowed how to build schooners when your old sirs built this one at
Mayoport," declared Captain Candage, trying to put a conciliatory tone
into his voice when he bellowed against the blast. "She'll live where
one of these fancy yachts of twice her size would be smothered."

Mayo did not answer. He leaped upon the house and helped Dolph and Otie
furl the mainsail that lay sprawled in the lazy-jaeks. They took their
time; the more imminent danger seemed to be over.

"I never knowed a summer blow to amount to much," observed Mr. Speed,
trying to perk up, though he was hanging on by both hands to avoid bring
blown off the slippery house.

"It depends on whether there's an extra special squall knotted into it
somewhere to windward," said Mayo, in a lull of the wind. "Then it can
amount to a devil of a lot, Mr. Speed!"

The schooner washed her nose in a curving billow that came inboard
and swept aft. With her small area of exposed sail and with the wind
buffeting her, she had halted and paid off, lacking steerageway. She got
several wallops of the same sort before she had gathered herself enough
to head into the wind.

Again she paid off, as if trying to avoid a volleying gust, and another
wave crested itself ahead of the blunt bows and then seemed to explode,
dropping tons of water on deck. Laths, lumber, and bunches of shingles
were ripped loose and went into the sea. The _Polly_ appeared to be
showing sagacity of her own in that crisis; she was jettisoning cargo
for her own salvation.

"Good Cephas! this is going to lose us our decklo'd," wailed the master.
"We'd better let her run!" "Don't you do it, sir! You'll never get her
about!" Mayo had given over his work on the sail and was listening.
Above the scream of the passing gusts which assailed him he was hearing
a dull and solemn roar to windward. He suspected what that sound
indicated. He had heard it before in his experience. He tried to
peer into the driving storm, dragging the rain from his eyes with his
fingers. Then nature held a torch for him. A vivid shaft of lightning
crinkled overhead and spread a broad flare of illumination across the
sea. His suspicions, which had been stirred by that sullen roar, were
now verified. He saw a low wall of white water, rolling and frothing. It
was a summer "spitter" trampling the waves.

A spitter is a freak in a regular tempest--a midsummer madness of
weather upheava