ean that I can learn to
know inside of two hours."

Strange to say, the gale, after easing to a mild breeze, recrudesced in a
sort of after-clap. With sails untrimmed and flapping, the consequent
smashing, crashing, and rending of our gear can be imagined. It brought
out in alarm every man for'ard.

"Trim the yards!" I yelled at Bert Rhine, who, backed for counsel by
Charles Davis and the Maltese Cockney, actually came directly beneath me
on the main deck in order to hear above the commotion aloft.

"Keep a-runnin, an' you won't have to trim," the gangster shouted up to
me.

"Want to make land, eh?" I girded down at him. "Getting hungry, eh?
Well, you won't make land or anything else in a thousand years once you
get all your top-hamper piled down on deck."

I have forgotten to state that this occurred at midday yesterday.

"What are you goin' to do if we trim?" Charles Davis broke in.

"Run off shore," I replied, "and get your gang out in deep sea where it
will be starved back to duty."

"We'll furl, an' let you heave to," the gangster proposed.

I shook my head and held up my rifle. "You'll have to go aloft to do it,
and the first man that gets into the shrouds will get this."

"Then she can go to hell for all we care," he said, with emphatic
conclusiveness.

And just then the fore-topgallant-yard carried away--luckily as the bow
was down-pitched into a trough of sea-and when the slow, confused, and
tangled descent was accomplished the big stick lay across the wreck of
both bulwarks and of that portion of the bridge between the foremast and
the forecastle head.

Bert Rhine heard, but could not see, the damage wrought. He looked up at
me challengingly, and sneered:

"Want some more to come down?"

It could not have happened more apropos. The port-brace, and immediately
afterwards the starboard-brace, of the crojack-yard--carried away. This
was the big, lowest spar on the mizzen, and as the huge thing of steel
swung wildly back and forth the gangster and his followers turned and
crouched as they looked up to see. Next, the gooseneck of the truss, on
which it pivoted, smashed away. Immediately the lifts and lower-topsail
sheets parted, and with a fore-and-aft pitch of the ship the spar
up-ended and crashed to the deck upon Number Three hatch, destroying that
section of the bridge in its fall.

All this was new to the gangster--as it was to me--but Charles Davis and
the Maltese Cockney thoroughl