on particularly
stormy nights, the villagers, snug in their warm beds, would waken for
a moment at a sound louder than the gale--the sound of Quinbey's voice,
which, in a calm, would carry a mile. And the voice would cry:

"All hands on deck to make sail. Out wi' you, you blasted lubber, and
lay aloft. Up wi' you, and loose that mainsail, and, when you've got it
loose, furl it. I'll show you how I earned that money. Up wi' you,
'fore I give you a rope's end."

And sometimes, in the lulls, they could hear Sammy's shrieks of pain,
and the thwack of the rope's end.

THE ROCK

"I tell ye I saw it--wi' these eyes I saw it!"

"You think you seen it."

"Now I quit. Ye talk like every mate or skipper or Consul I've told
this to. Just the same, I never git to the end o' the third day out,
either way,--I'm in a six-day boat, ye know--but what the nervousness
gits me, an' I'm no good for twelve hours, until I know we're past the
spot."

"A rock, you say, in the middle o' the Atlantic? Why isn't it known and
charted?"

"Because it's awash an' visible only at the fall o' the spring tides."

"How is it that no one else saw it but you?"

"I was the only man aloft. She was a hemp-rigged old ballyhoo out o'
Quebec, an' gear was chafin' through all the time. I was passin' a new
seizin' on the collar o' the foretopmast stay, when I squinted ahead
through the fog, and there it was black an' shiny, an' murderous, about
forty feet long, I should judge, and five feet or so out o' water,
right dead under the bow. I could see the lift o' the water where the
current pushed ag'in' it, and the swirl on t'other side, showin' it was
no derelict, bottom up. No, it was a rock. 'Starboard!' I yells to the
felly at the wheel. 'Starboard! Hard up!' Well, the skipper was below,
an' the second mate, who had the deck, was mixin' paint under the
fo'c'sle; so the wheel went up an' the old wagon payed off 'fore the
wind. Then I lost it myself in the fog, an', as I couldn't point out
anything to the skipper when he come up, I was called down an' damned
for a fool. But I saw it, just the same, a big rock halfway across, and
squarely between the lane routes!"

"How do you know that?"

"The skipper wasn't above givin' me the ship's position--forty-seven
north; thirty-seven twenty west. That's between the lanes, an' I'll bet
the _Narconic_ is at the base o' that rock, to say nothin' o' the
_Pacific_, the _President_, and t'others."

The wa