Adventure Magazine Cover — page 57: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Third Mate | going overside; I’m going aboard. ‘There’s cutlasses and muskets in the Captain’s cabin. I’m going to drive them heathen overboard!”’ The mate, who was captain now, tried to” protest. “Hist,” said Clough, ‘‘do ye hear, up aloft there, that moaning in the rigging? *Tis the Portygee lad. He’s saying his prayers. ’Fore morning he’ll be dropping off like a ripe coconut. Would ye leave him to the niggers? Would ye leave the Sharon struck adrift with them hell-cats aboard? ’Tis a little thing to gaff a heathen in the dark. I’m going aboard!”’ “But the sharks, man! There’s a million of ’em in the water hereabouts!”’ “They'll smell the whale, not me,” an- swered the third mate, but he put his dirk in his teeth. In another instant he had slipped like an eel into the water. ‘The watchers in the boats, straining their eyes through the gloom, saw, for an instant, the pale blur of his face against the black water; then he was swal- lowed up in the obscurity. The blubber-hunters of those days were adorned with a large square window on either side of the stern—port-holes would hardly be the word. ‘To swim the length of the ship, climb the rudder and enter the cabin through one of these windows would, under ordinary conditions, have been the work of a few minutes. But to strike out boldly in the darkness, in those phosphor- escent waters, would have been a dead give-away. Therefore Clough turned on his back, submerged himself until only his nose stuck out, and resorted to treading water. To make headway in this manner, to make no noise, to leave no trail, requires endur- ance and patience. To run the invisible gauntlet of man-eating sharks, undismayed and deliberately, requires a rare degree of courage. . From the outset luck was against the third mate, for the Sharon, suddenly taken aback in the light and varying breeze, seemed possessed of an insensate desire to keep abreast of him, to make a mock of his snail-like progress. Clough was in the water over an hour. At last, chilled, dripping and weary, but un- dismayed, his dirk still in his teeth, Clough dived under the stern and, coming to the surface, clutched the rudder with both hands. At the same moment a tremor, d) 813 subtle but terrifying, almost imperceptibly agitated the water, like the muffled and re- duced concussion of some submarine explo- sion, or the vibrations caused by the rapid and convulsive movements of some monster under the sea. Heaving himself up the rudder-stem with a convulsive effort, he swung himself just clear as the snuffle of -a shark broke the water so close under his feet that the bubbles struck his toes. Hooking. his hands inside the starboard window, he pulled himself up and in a mo- ment stood on the cabin floor. He held his breath and listened. Not a sound. The beating of his heart made a tumultuous and insistent thunder in his ears that he-strove to stifle by pressing his hands against his breast. The trickle of water from ~ his trousers sounded like the ebbing of a tide down a gully. Partly to free himself from this irritation, partly to rendei himself as slippery in a possible clinch as his black ad- versaries, he took off his nether garments and stood naked. He tip-toed to the cabin stairs and looked upward. Not a footfall on deck; the ship might have been de- serted. i) daring to strike a light, the impal- pable barrier fairly pushing in his eye-balls, the third mate set about discov- ering weapons for himself. Two cutlasses he found and stood them against the stairs; two muskets also. Were they empty? Were they loaded? He hooked his toe over the hammer of one of them and blew down the barrel. It was empty. He began fumbling through the Captain’s s locker for powder and ball. One drawer after another he ransacked. Nothing. At last, in the bottom one, he uncovered what he wanted, the powder tightly corkedin a bottle. He pulled the cork with his teeth, poured in enough to have blown a hole through the bottom of the old Sharon, rammed the ball down and stood the gun with the cutlasses. IN THE impenetrable darkness, not He was in the act of loading the second, | was pouring in the powder, when a sound, barely perceptible, so faint that it merged into and was one with the silence, came from the deck above. One would have said that something, some one, was walking on the deck with the velvet tread of a cat. It is possible sometimes to hear what is inaudi- ble. Clough, waiting in the obscurity, COmiclbook C©