l. It is a thunderbolt of wind, a concentration of gale,
a whirling dervish of disaster--wind compactly bunched into one almighty
blast--wind enough to last a regular gale for a whole day if the stock
were spent thriftily.

"Don't ease her an inch!" screamed Mayo.

But just then another surging sea climbed aboard and picked up more of
the laths and more of the shingles, and frolicked away into the night
with the plunder. Captain Candage's sense of thrift got a more vital jab
than did his sense of fear. His eyes were on his wheel, and he had not
seen the wall of white spume.

"That decklo'd has got to be lashed," he muttered. He decided to run
with the wind till that work could be performed. He threw his helm hard
over. Mayo had been riding the main boom astraddle, hitching himself
toward the captain, to make him hear. When the volunteer saw the master
of the _Polly_ trying to turn tail to the foe in that fashion, he leaped
to the wheel, but he was too late. The schooner had paid off too much.
The yelling spitter caught them as they were poised broadside on the top
of a wave, before the sluggish craft had made her full turn.

What happened then might have served as confirmation of mariners'
superstition that a veritable demon reigns in the heart of the tempest.
The attack on the old _Polly_ showed devilish intelligence in team-work.
A crashing curler took advantage of the loosened deckload and smashed
the schooner a longside buffet which sent all the lumber in a sliding
drive against the lee rail and rigging. The mainsail had been only
partly secured; the spitter blew into the flapping canvas with all its
force and the sail snapped free and bellied out.

The next instant the _Polly_ was tripped!

She went over with all the helpless, dead-weight violence of a man who
has caught his toe on a drooping clothes line in the dark.

The four men who were on deck were sailors and they did not need
orders when they felt that soul-sickening swing of her as she toppled.
Instinctively, with one accord, they dived for the cabin companionway.

Undoubtedly, as a sailor, the first thought of each was that the
schooner was going on to her beam-ends. Therefore, to remain on deck
meant that they would either slide into the water or that a smashing
wave would carry them off.

They went tumbling down together in the darkness, and all four of
them, with impulse of preservation as instant and true as that of the
trap-door spider, set