you, George! you're all right--ste-a-dy. Hold that dory
up to the wind!--that's it, boys--you're all right--straight ahead
now! That's the stuff. Turn her in now again, skipper. In the dory
there--show your lantern in the dory and be ready for the seine-boat.
Good enough. Now cover your lantern in the dory and haul away when
you're ready."

To have experienced the strain and drive of that rush, to have held an
oar in the boat during that and to have shared with the men in the
confidence they gathered--ours was a skipper to steer a boat around a
school--and the soul that rang in Clancy's voice!--why, just to stand
on deck, as I did, and listen to it--it was like living.

During this dash we could make out neither boat nor dory from deck,
but the flashes of light raised by the oars at every stroke were
plainly to be seen in that phosphorescent sea. Certainly they were
making that boat hop along! Ten good men, with every man a long, broad
blade, and double banked, so that every man might encourage his mate
and be himself spurred on by desperate effort. Legs, arms, shoulders,
back, all went into it and their wake alive with smoke and fire to
tell them they were moving! To be in that?--The middle of a black
night on the Atlantic was this, and the big seine-heaver was throwing
the seine in great armfuls. And Hurd and Parsons in the little dory
tossing behind and gamely trying to keep up! They were glad enough to
be in the dory, I know, to get hold of the buoy, and you can be sure
there was some lively action aboard of her when Clancy called so
fiercely to them to hold the buoy up to the wind, so that the efforts
of the crew of the seine-boat, racing to get their two hundred odd
fathoms of twine fence around the flying school, might not go for
naught.

XVI

WE GET A FINE SCHOOL

With his "Haul away now when you're ready," Clancy came down from
aloft. He was sliding down evidently by way of the jib halyards, for
there was the sound of a chafing whiz that could be nothing else than
the friction of oilskins against taut manila rope, a sudden check, as
of a block met on the way, an impatient, soft, little forgivable oath,
and then a plump! that meant that he must have dropped the last twelve
or fifteen feet to the deck. Immediately came the scurry of his
boot-heels as he hurried aft. In another moment he stood in the glow
of the binnacle light, and reaching back toward the shadow of the
cook, but never turning his h