ib down before it blows
away," he said.

Wyllard staggered after him up to his knees in water, and made out by
the mad banging that some of them had already cast the peak of the
boom-foresail loose. Then he reached the windlass, and clutched it as
a sea that took him to the waist frothed in over the weather rail. The
bows lurched out of it viciously, hurling another icy flood back on
him, and he could see a dim white chaos about and beneath them. Over
it rose the black wedge of the jibs.

He did not want to get out along the bowsprit to stop one of them down.
Indeed his whole physical nature shrank from it, but there are many
things flesh and blood shrink from which must be faced at sea. Then he
made out that a Siwash was fumbling at the down-haul made fast near his
side, and when his companion's shadowy figure rose up against the
whiteness of the foam he made a jump forward. Then he was on the
bowsprit, lying upon it while he felt for the foot-rope slung beneath.
He found it, and was cautiously lowering himself when the man in front
of him called out harshly, and he saw a white sea range up ahead. It
broke short over with a rush and roar, and he clung with hands and feet
for his life as the schooner's dipping bows rammed the seething mass.

She went into it to the windlass. He was smothered in an icy flood
that seemed bent on wrenching him from his hold, but that was only for
a moment or two, and then he was swung, gasping and streaming with
water, high above the sea again. It was bad enough merely to hold on,
but that was a very small share of his task, for the big black sail
that cut the higher darkness came rattling down its stay and fell upon
him and his companion bodily. As it dropped the wind took hold of the
folds of it and buffeted them cruelly. This was a thing he had once
been accustomed to, but as he clutched at the canvas it seemed to him
incredible that he had not already been flung off headlong from the
reeling spar. Still, that banging, thrashing canvas must be mastered
somehow, though it was snow-soaked and almost unyielding, and he clawed
at it furiously with bleeding hands while twice the bowsprit raked a
sea and dipped him waist-deep in. At length the other man flung him
the end of the gasket, and they worked back carefully, leaving the sail
lashed down, and scrambled aft to help the others who were making the
big main-boom fast. When this was done Wyllard fell against Dampier
and clu