mind. He had betrayed himself, he had made an enemy of the man
who knew something which could help him; he felt a queer sense of shame
and despair when he remembered the girl and the expression of her face.
He tried to convince himself that he did not care what her opinion
of him was. What happened to that love she had professed on board the
_Olenia?_ What manner of maiden was this? He did not understand!

Five times he made his precarious trip with the lead, fumbling his way
outside the rigging.

In twenty fathoms Captain Downs decided to anchor, after the mate,
"arming" the lead by filling its cup with grease, found that they were
over good holding ground.

When the _Alden_ came into the wind and slowed down, slapping wet
sails, the second mate hammered out the holding-pin of the gigantic port
anchor, and the hawse-hole belched fathom after fathom of chain.

All hands were on deck letting sails go on the run into the lazy-jacks,
and the big schooner swung broadside to the trough of the sea. She made
a mighty pendulum, rolling rails under, sawing the black skies with her
towering masts.

There are many things which can happen aboard a schooner in that
position when men are either slow or stupid. A big negro who was paying
out the mizzen-peak halyards allowed his line to foul. Into the triangle
of sail the wind volleyed, and the thirty-foot mizzen-boom, the roll
of the ship helping, swung as far as its loosened sheets allowed. The
"traveler," an iron hoop encircling a long bar of iron fastened at both
ends to the deck, struck sparks as a trolley pulley produces fire from a
sleety wire.

With splintering of wood and clanging of metal, the iron bar was
wrenched from its deck-fastenings and began to fly to and fro across the
deck at the end of its tether, like a giant's slung-shot. It circled, it
spun, it flung itself afar and returned in unexpected arcs.

Men fled from the area which this terror dominated.

The boom swung until it banged the mizzen shrouds to port, and then came
swooping back across the deck, to slam against the starboard shrouds.
The clanging, tethered missile it bore on its end seemed to be searching
for a victim. When the boom met the starboard shrouds in its headlong
rush, the schooner shivered.

"Free that halyard and douse the peak!" roared the first mate.

A sailor started, ducking low, but he ran back when the boom came across
the deck with such a vicious swing that the iron bar fairly