THE TOW.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5500, 27 February 1896, Page 4

THE TOW.

■ *„> [by c. j. cutcxiffe htne.] (Harper's Weekly.) The night was very hot and very still, with a, steep swell running up from the north-east after days of windless calm. The sea burnt in flames like summer lightning, and the hot black sky blinked and blazed like the phosphorescence. When the steamer slid her . nose down . into a yaUey, the screw raced noisily, and the poop^deck showed bright against a Catherine wheel of fire. In the chart house the captain lay on the outside of his bed in shirt and cap and cotton trousers. His rubber thigh boots and a leather bound oil skin lay handy in a heap on the floor. He was sleeping most industriously, anticipating what was to follow. On the upper bridge the second mate and a Norwegian quarter-master pinned the Paraguay steadily ; to her course. They were briskly alert, both of them; and every half bell the officer stamped down the leaded steps of the ladder and gloWered at tfie aneroid in the head of the companion way. Each time, as he came back, the second mate swore to himself softly and pungently. ; On the forecastle head the remaining member of the steamer's visible complement glided silently to and fro, swinging his eyes mechanically through one unvarying quadrant of the night, and lifting up his voice each half hour for the melancholy minor chant of "All's well" after the bell had clanged-out its notion . of the time. There were noises like the squeaking of new shoes which might have made one think that other people were about on the prowl. But these came from the Paraguay herself. She was old, and the send of the sea. ran high, and . the wrenching made her rivets ache and cry out querulously. . Seven bells had just gone — half-past eleven — and the second mate was thinking that in another . thirty-five minutes he would be snoring in his bunk, cyclone or no cyclone/ His spell of responsibility was drawing to an end, and he was feeling a freer man. He was doing his usual pendulum walk along the bridge, an up hill and down ■ ' dale walk as the : steamer lolled over the swells, when of a sudden he brought up short opposite the binnacle, and swung smartly round on his heels. Like most sailors he had that indefinable faculty of seeing out of the back of his head, and it seemed to him then that a light had sprung up from the sea, far away in the black distance. The yellow glow from the binnacle dazzled him. He walked to the bridge end arid thrust his chin over the canvas dodger, and peered into the night from there. . The lightning flickered above, the little, flames of the phosphorescence burnt beneath; but there was nothing else. Presently he turned and hailed : " Fo'c's'le there ! Did you see anything broad abeam to loo'rd about a minute since ? " ' The ; reply came in a sleepy monotone: " No ; seen nothing, sir." " H'm," grumbled the secdhd mate to himself; "must have been a starshooting." But still he kept on staring over the top of the dodger, and presently he whistled aloud, and said, "By God ! what's that, sow ? " ; The lightning was put for the moment, and the abyss of darkness before him was being cut by a curving line of yellow flame, which slid slowly up and came to a brilliant head, and then broke into a constellation of tiny stars. • • : The second mate's action was prompt^ He clapped a- whistle' between his teeth and blew till adeck hand came tumbling up out of the .corner where he had been dozing ; gave his orders ; and in thirty seconds saw . them executed. With a fizz and a woosh and a roar, the Paraguay's answering rocket spirted up into the heavens. As though it had been expected, another rocket slid skyward in the distance, and j then" another, and then others. And to take away the last atom of doubt as to what was the matter, news was' given to the second mate of another sort. The Paraguay was brigantine rigged, and giving the deck hand a night glass, the officer of the watch had sent him to the i fore-topgallant yard to see if hecould make out anything from there. • . The hail came down promptly. " Three red lights, one above the other, broad on the star-board beam." And then — "Ah, the lightning showing her now. A big fine screw boat, sir, about five uniles off* rolling in the trough with no way on. She's painted black, and I'd caM her 6000 tons. Seems to me like one of the Spanish Main Line boats." The second mate had got Ms bearings already. "Eight points starboard," he said, and whilst the quartermaster was repeating the order and sawing over the spokes of the steam wheel, he was running down the ladder as fast as the rails could slip through his hands! The captain's eyes opened with a snap as the second mate swung into the deck house. ; - . "Wind come away already ? " he asked, ' sitting up and putting his arms into a jacket. : "Not yet, sir, though it may be down on us any minute. But there's a big steamer disabled and showing rockets and distress lights about five miles off to the norrard." "Well?" . . ; " I headed for her, and then came down and told you. Shell be wanting to pluck in somewhere, I'm thinking." . . "Oh my Lord," said the captain, "has the chance come forme at last after twenty years of waiting? Am I going to get a good fat tew and bilk the workhouse after all? Don't tell me she's some cheap old tramp, LleweUen." . . "I sent a man aloft, sir, and he said he thought shes was one of the Spanish Main boats." ''""' . . ; The captain, ran on to the upper "bridge. '" Spanish Main boat," he repeated. " Let's see; whafs the date? Ah! Their Tampico would be due about here just now. She'd have specie on board and eighty passengers, I guess, besides mails and cargo. ' If she's lying here' disabled with this weather coming on it Would mean a thousand pounds out of the salvage for me if- 1 pulled her in safe somewhere, and a purse of at least

five hundred pounds from the passengers after the scare this gale will rub into them. Oh, Lord!- To think of it. But no such slice of luck for me. I'll not believe it. I was bom on a Friday." .The Paraguay closed with the disabled steamer, and the captain danced on the planking of the upper bridge. "Oh, Llewellen," he cried ! " Here's fortune ! It iB that fa -old Tampico herself, and no other.* Vaughan's her skipper now, the same chap that gave evidence against me, and dirtied my ticket about that running down business. I guess he's got to scream howi We'll bleed that steamboat till her owners wish she'd never been built. Slip down to the chief, will you, and say I want him to take the engine roomhimsefi for the next Heaven knows how long ; and whilst you're passing rout out the mate, and tell him to rouse that new lOin, coir rope of ours out of the store and get it passed aft. —■ Ohe, the Tampico there !" The hail came back from a shadowy form on the other steamer's bridge: "Gtlad to see you, captain. Whaf s your steamer ?" "The Paraguay— tramping. Do you want any help ? You seem to have a lot of passengers aboard there." "I've broken my shaft. For how much will you give me a tow into Port Eoyal, Jamaica V ■' "Is that Captain Vaughan that's speaking ?" "Yes/ "Well, I'm Captain Owen Morgan, and I fancy it's no use us two haggling here. If we did hit on a price it could be upset afterwards. You pass me your rope, captain, and we'll let the courts settle up the bill between us when the time comes. Better put some hurry in it; the wind may come away any minute now." "Very well," said the master of the Tampico, and gave his orders. . ■ On the instant three port fires blazed out, pouring molten drops on to the black water beneath, turning the faces of the men who held them and of the frightened passengers who clustered at the rail white and ghastly beyond belief. Captain Morgan looked on and chuckled. He was going to risk his life and his ship, and those passengers would pay him liberally for doing it. The worse their scare the more generous would be their offerings, and the master of the Paraguay prayed that the gale which was to come might be the worst they could possibly live through. He was a poor man, this Captain Owen Morgan, with debts and a family dragging on him, and such a chance had never come to him before, and might reasonably be expected never to come again. To all merchant skippers the height of fortune is a good fat tow and plenty of coal, but most of them die before it arrives. And here was .£200,000 rolling helpless in the trough, and ready to yield up its lawful eighth for salvage. Captain Morgan could have hugged himself with delight. The Tampico's port lifeboat hung outboard in davits ready manned by a crew in uncouth cork jackets. As the blue fires blazed out the tackles screamed through the blocks. She hit the water with a great hissing splash, unhooked on the instant, and was spurned away as the steamer's black side heaved up thirty feet on the swell. The oars straddled out like the legs of some crawling insect, beating the water one after the other ; but by degrees they fell into time, and the boat wormed its way over the rolling seas. She carried a two-inch rope made fast to the ring bolt in her stern, and on the Tampico's fore deck a couple of seamen paid out the rope from a coil as the boat dragged it towards the other steamer. The rop© was passed on board the Paraguay, and brought to the after winch, and the lifeboat hurried back as fast as a frightened crew could scurry her. A ridge of fire had grown across the distant sea, and it was driving down on the steamers with the pace of a bullet. The Paraguay winch bucked till the deck swung beneath it, and the great wire hawser which snaked off the Tampico's fore deck bit a string of sparks . from the fair-leads. The cyclone was upon them before the winch had heaved the wire rope through the tafErail, and it opened with a squall of hail, which beat on the working, men like musketry. The winch ran on, but the hauling rope slipped over the drum, because the men who were hauling in the slack w,ere driven from their work by missiles large as pigeons' eggs. The hail, however, lasted less than thirty seconds. A blast of wind followed, solid as the end of a house, and the two steamers were driven before it, lifting like empty bladders. The Tampico's lifeboat went as an avant-coureur. A' lightning flash showed her with oars blown away and crew looking dazed and helpless. She was scudding from crest to crest like a handful of grey spin drift. And in what corner of the Caribbean Sea she buried her men they alone can tell. The Paraguay's winch rattled irreverently on, and brought the jwire'hawser up to the bollards. ' There it was made fast to well backed spans of lOin coir, and word was passed to the bridge. "Time enough, too," said Morgan. "We've rim it close," and rang on his engines, first to " half," and then, after a minute, to " full ahead." He emphasized this last order by ringing them twice more, and then took over the steam steering wheel from the quartermaster. That was the place where nerve was required. If the. steamer deviated one hand's breadth from the right course and got stopped by a sea which did not equally impede her tow, it would be entirely useless to 'scuffle about other details. The Tampico would swoop down on the top of her, and the pair of them would grind each 'other into their primitive plates in two handfuls of seconds. • The : oily swell existed no longer now. The wind pluoked the tops of the waves, bodily away and churned them iutofoaming yeast. Even this -could not well be : seen. The air was full of scurrying spindrift, which stung the face like nettles. : To run before the cyclone was another name for hari-kari. -So Captain- Morgan took hissteamer in a large and wallowing circle till the wind hit her squarely on the bows, and the Tampico, like a wet black bottle, followed after, tugging viciously at her tail.. In the process she tried very hard to turn keel uppermost several times, and rarely showed more of herself than a couple of- masts and a funnel and the weather dodger of the bridge bristling through the spray. And when at last she flung herself clear with a four-foot list to starboard, the fore-topmast was gone with all the yards, and 1 the starboard bulwark of the lower fore-deck had ceased to exist. Captain Morgan spat tte water out of his mouth