him, but he went on clinging to the top-gallant mast-stays and
looking down he could see the faces of the others following him, faces
sheeted over with rain and working blindly upwards.

Ponting was the man immediately below him, and taking breath for a
moment and against the wind, Ponting was now yelling out that they had
their work cut out for them.

They had.

The top-gallant sail had taken charge of itself, and Raft and Ponting as
they lay out on the yard seemed battling with a thing alive,
intelligent, and desperately wicked.

The sail snored and trembled and sang, standing out in great hoods and
folds, hard as steel; now it would yield, owing to a slackening of the
wind, and then, like a brute that had only been waiting to take them by
surprise, it would burst out again, releasing itself, whilst the yard
buckled and sprang, almost casting them from it.

Then began a battle fought without a sound or cry except the bubbling
and snoring of the great sail struggling for its wicked liberty, it
shrank and they flung themselves on it, it bellied and flung them back,
clinging to the lift they saved themselves, attacking it again with the
dumb fury of dogs or wolves on a fighting prey. Twenty times it tried to
destroy them and twenty times they all but had it under.

The fight died out of the monster for a moment and Raft had nearly an
armful of it in when it stiffened, fighting free of him, owing to
Ponting and the other fellow not having made good. They clung for a
moment without moving, resting, and Raft glancing down saw far away
below the narrow deck driving wedge-like through the foam-capped seas.

Then the struggle began again. The sail, like its would-be captors,
seemed also to have taken breath, it held firm, relaxed, banged out
again in thunder, developed new hoods and folds as a struggling monster
might develop new heads and kinks, and then, all of a sudden when it
seemed that no effort was of avail the end came.

The wind paused for a moment, as if gathering up all its strength
against the dogged persistency which is man, and in that moment the
three on the yard had the sail under their chests beating and crushing
the life out of it. Then the gaskets were passed round it and they clung
for a moment to rest and breathe.

It was nothing, or they thought nothing of it, this battle for life with
a monster, just the stowing of a top-gallant sail in dirty weather, and
most likely when they got down the Bo'