a's that?" cried Davis, bounding in the boat and upsetting the
champagne.

"You lost the _Sea Ranger_ because you were a drunken sot," said
Herrick. "Now you're going to lose the _Farallone_. You're going to
drown here the same way as you drowned others, and be damned. And your
daughter shall walk the streets, and your sons be thieves like their
father."

For the moment the words struck the captain white and foolish. "My God!"
he cried, looking at Herrick as upon a ghost; "my God, Herrick!"

"Look behind you, then!" reiterated the assailant.

The wretched man, already partly sobered, did as he was told, and in the
same breath of time leaped to his feet. "Down staysail!" he trumpeted.
The hands were thrilling for the order, and the great sail came with a
run, and fell half overboard among the racing foam. "Jib top-sail
halyards! Let the stays'l be," he said again.

But before it was well uttered, the squall shouted aloud and fell, in a
solid mass of wind and rain commingled, on the _Farallone_; and she
stooped under the blow, and lay like a thing dead. From the mind of
Herrick reason fled; he clung in the weather rigging, exulting; he was
done with life, and he gloried in the release; he gloried in the wild
noises of the wind and the choking onslaught of the rain; he gloried to
die so, and now, amid this coil of the elements. And meanwhile, in the
waist, up to his knees in water--so low the schooner lay--the captain
was hacking at the fore-sheet with a pocket-knife. It was a question of
seconds, for the _Farallone_ drank deep of the encroaching seas. But the
hand of the captain had the advance; the foresail boom tore apart the
last strands of the sheet and crashed to lee-ward; the _Farallone_
leaped up into the wind and righted; and the peak and throat halyards,
which had long been let go, began to run at the same instant.

For some ten minutes more she careered under the impulse of the squall;
but the captain was now master of himself and of his ship, and all
danger at an end. And then, sudden as a trick-change upon the stage,
the squall blew by, the wind dropped into light airs, the sun beamed
forth again upon the tattered schooner; and the captain, having secured
the foresail boom and set a couple of hands to the pump, walked aft,
sober, a little pale, and with the sodden end of a cigar still stuck
between his teeth even as the squall had found it. Herrick followed him;
he could scarce recall the violence of his