Poor Mans Rock | Page 3

full white beard descending from his chin, a fierce-visaged, vigorous old man. Near him stood a man of middle age, a ruddy-faced man in whose dark blue eyes a flame burned as he eyed the two in the sloop. The third was younger still,--a short, sturdy fellow in flannels, tending the mainsheet with a frowning glance.
The man in the sloop held his course.
"Damn you, MacRae; lay to, or I'll run you down," the patriarch at the cutter's wheel shouted, when a boat's length separated the two craft.
MacRae's lips moved slightly, but no sound issued therefrom. Leaning on the tiller, he let the sloop run. So for a minute the boats sailed, the white yacht edging up on the sloop until it seemed as if her broaded-off boom would rake and foul the other. But when at last she drew fully abreast the two men sheeted mainsail and jib flat while the white-headed helmsman threw her over so that the yacht drove in on the sloop and the two younger men grappled MacRae's coaming with boat hooks, and side by side they came slowly up into the wind.
MacRae made no move, said nothing, only regarded the three with sober intensity. They, for their part, wasted no breath on him.
"Elizabeth, get in here," the girl's father commanded.
It was only a matter of stepping over the rubbing gunwales. The girl rose. She cast an appealing glance at MacRae. His face did not alter. She stepped up on the guard, disdaining the hand young Gower extended to help her, and sprang lightly into the cockpit of the Gull.
"As for you, you calculating blackguard," her father addressed MacRae, "if you ever set foot on Maple Point again, I'll have you horsewhipped first and jailed for trespass after."
For a second MacRae made no answer. His nostrils dilated; his blue-gray eyes darkened till they seemed black. Then he said with a curious hoarseness, and in a voice pitched so low it was scarcely audible:
"Take your boat hooks out of me and be on your way."
The older man withdrew his hook. Young Gower held on a second longer, matching the undisguised hatred in Donald MacRae's eyes with a fury in his own. His round, boyish face purpled. And when he withdrew the boat hook he swung the inch-thick iron-shod pole with a swift twist of his body and struck MacRae fairly across the face.
MacRae went down in a heap as the Gull swung away. The faint breeze out of the west filled the cutter's sails. She stood away on a long tack south by west, with a frightened girl cowering down in her cabin, sobbing in grief and fear, and three men in the _Gull's_ cockpit casting dubious glances at one another and back to the fishing sloop sailing with no hand on her tiller.
In an hour the Gull was four miles to windward of the sloop. The breeze had taken a sudden shift full half the compass. A southeast wind came backing up against the westerly. There was in its breath a hint of something stronger.
Masterless, the sloop sailed, laid to, started off again erratically, and after many shifts ran off before this stiffer wind. Unhelmed, she laid her blunt bows straight for the opening between Sangster and Squitty islands. On the cockpit floor Donald MacRae sprawled unheeding. Blood from his broken face oozed over the boards.
Above him the boom swung creaking and he did not hear. Out of the southeast a bank of cloud crept up to obscure the sun. Far southward the Gulf was darkened, and across that darkened area specks and splashes of white began to show and disappear. The hot air grew strangely cool. The swell that runs far before a Gulf southeaster began to roll the sloop, abandoned to all the aimless movements of a vessel uncontrolled. She came up into the wind and went off before it again, her sails bellying strongly, racing as if to outrun the swells which now here and there lifted and broke. She dropped into a hollow, a following sea slewed her stern sharply, and she jibed,--that is, the wind caught the mainsail and flung it violently from port to starboard. The boom swept an arc of a hundred degrees and put her rail under when it brought up with a jerk on the sheet.
Ten minutes later she jibed again. This time the mainsheet parted. Only stout, heavily ironed backstays kept mainsail and boom from being blown straight ahead. The boom end swung outboard till it dragged in the seas as she rolled. Only by a miracle and the stoutest of standing gear had she escaped dismasting. Now, with the mainsail broaded off to starboard, and the jib by some freak of wind and sea winged out to port, the sloop drove straight before the wind,