w one wild night on the Southern Pacific grew into
morning gives me back youth and morning again when I cared nothing for
death, since death was as far off, as impossible, ay, as absurd, as Fame
itself.

It had blown hard all day, and an hour after midnight our scanty band,
some ten of us (mostly Cockneys like myself), stood upon the foot-ropes
of the lower fore-topsail. There should have been twenty, but to be
undermanned has been English fashion since Agincourt. Growl we ever so
loudly where could more be found? The work was to be done by ten, one
more even was not to be asked for. If the task seemed possible, why, it
was possible, and when we scrambled to that narrow line of battle in the
dark it seemed as easy as most things at sea, where the difficult is
done hourly. Risks are nothing there; to risk nothing would be to risk
destruction and to incur the bitter reproach of having shipped "not to
go aloft." Each man to his fellow on the yard was a shadow and a pale
blot of a face; each voice was a windy whisper, a bellow blown down into
silence. As the ship ran, and lifted, and pitched and trembled, her
narrow wedge shape was a blot beneath us: on each side of her white foam
marked the hissing, hungry sea. But, with the sail surging before us in
its gear like a mad balloon, who noted aught but the sail? I leant out
upon my taut bulge of living canvas, beat it with the flat of my hand,
and being the youngest waited for the word to "leech" it or "skin" it
up. Being tall I was not at the extremity of the yard arm; my fellow
fore-topman and a little squat man from the lower Thames stood outside
me. My mate and the man inside were my world. The others I saw and heard
not. The word came along the yard from the bunt to "leech" it up, and we
leant over and caught the leech and pulled it on the yard. Now the fight
began, but the beginning of it was easy sparring, and though the wind
blew heavy, and each minute we had to remember death when she checked
her roll with a jerk, the weather leech came up easy and we chuckled,
each being glad. And in half an hour, or an hour, we were half masters
of the wind, or as much of it as gave the sail life, after many small
defeats. And then (whose fault of fingers for not being steel hooks, who
shall say?) the wind, having got reinforcements, tore the victory from
us and away went the sail once more free and thundering in the dark. The
word was passed again, the indomitable word by the indomi