, the wind shifted, and any one
could see with half an eye that there was trouble brewin'. The sea smelt
of a storm. We made everything snug alow and aloft, put in double reefs
and lay by.

"'At two bells of the afternoon watch, the gale struck us, and it struck
us hard. Captain Evans Wood, the skipper, a mighty good seaman, handled
the craft well, but our foretopmast was snapped right out before the
gale had been on us an hour.

"'The jib-boom, too, went with the crash and the nasty mess of timber
and shrouds, floatin' to leeward, began to hammer at our hull in an ugly
fashion. A couple of us got at the wreckage as best we could, but before
we had cut it adrift, the _Allison Doura_ had sprung a leak and four of
us went to the pumps.

"'While we were workin' at the wreckage of the foremast, the schooner
was pooped and the wheel was carried away. Bill Higgins, a young fellow
who was at the wheel, was swept against the rail and had his head split
open.

"'I've seen some bad weather in my time, but never just in that way.
With the mizzen boom we rigged up a fore jury-mast and made shift to
hoist a storm staysail to give us steerin' way and rigged up a tiller
for steerin'. The wind was whistling like all possessed. It was askin'
more than any vessel had a right to stand, and around midnight the fore
staysail was blown clean out of the bolt ropes and she lost steerage
way again. We couldn't hold her to the wind.

"'With losin' steerage way so much and without bein' able to hold her up
to the wind at all, we couldn't run out of the storm. The gale drove us
in and in to the centre of the hurricane. Somewhere around dawn on
Sunday mornin' the wind decided to show us what it really could do. We
were runnin' before the wind with a triple-reefed mainsail and not
another stitch. "Why weren't we under bare poles," you asks? Because
there was a sea chasin' after us with every wave looking like a whale
out of water. We weren't lookin' to get pooped, any more than we had to.
The mainmast went with a crash.

"'That left it nasty. The mizzen-mast, bein' the only one left standin',
took her down by the stern and the waves runnin' along behind slapped us
in the quarters good and proper. The skipper he give us orders to cut
away the mizzen-mast, to lighten her.

"'It didn't take much cuttin' neither. The axes hadn't more than gotten
through one of the weather shrouds, when the gale took the mast and
chucked it over the side. That l