Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 90: what you’re looking at

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

72 water in the well and the pumps refused to work.” There was more than that in the after hold. Bound from Philadelphia for Tampa, the Blackfish had caught the tail end of an autumn hurricane off the mouth of Tampa Bay. Warned by the falling glass, her dirty canvas had been taken in, but her rotten masts, even bared as they were, could not stand before the eighty or ninety mile wind. At dusk of a Thursday the gale had struck them; half an hour later the mizzen went by the board, pounding a great hole in her side right between wind and water before it could be cut loose. At midnight the mainmast went, smashing one of the only two boats in its fall, but doing little other damage. Slowly the bark settled at the stern; slowly her stem raised toward the storm-blackened skies until it seemed, as she mounted wave after wave, that surely she would rear up and over, plunging down to her death. But she floated, for the after hold was full of hard wood lumber. In the forward hold was rock ballast and farm machincry. If she opened a seam forward, or if the bulk- head broke—another ship gone; another crew to the port of missing men. Again the captain took his pencil and wrote hurriedly—he had much practise at writing. Before the love of liquor had be- come so strong that it dispelled every other affection from this Johnstone he had made love a bit too violently to a dancing girl i in a café on the mountain at Rio. Striking like a wind-blown rope end, she had thrust a small stiletto in his throat, but he did not die. By the thousandth of an inch he missed that death, and from the wound grew the affliction which gave him hiS name of Dummy. There were days when his rasping tones out-shrieked the gulls; there were also days when anger, fear, excitement, or too much liquor quite muted his harsh voice or turned it into squawking horror. Drunk, he was almost always dumb. The captain had a deal of practise writing! The note he gave his mate read: I shall inspect forward hold this morning. If doubtful, we abandon ship at once. There was no trace of more than ordi- nary interest in Dugan’s face, but he thought— Adventure “With a couple of augur holes she'll be doubtful, most likely! She is, by the saints, very well insured, I’ll bet!” And she was, for several times her value. Five thousand would have been very dear for her, for nigh unto death was she when Dugan O’Day shipped at Philadelphia as her first officer. Her planking, once copper- sheathed to the water line, was rotten with worms and foul with barnacles and weeds in the spots where the copper was gone, and above the water line her sides were mostly paint. It is well known that old ships, like old women, require more of it than younger ones. In the full brunt of the hurricane the old Blackfish, would not have lived an hour be- fore she foundered. Caught where that wind blew even as much as two hundred miles an hour, and the waves would have been higher than her main yard! Lucky was she and her hard bitten crew that they caught only the edge of it. With the hurricane over at noon Friday, they had lumbered on toward the coast of Florida, and in the eighteen hours from then until daylight Saturday, when Dugan O’Day went to the saloon to look at the glass, they made perhaps as much as a knot an hour; surely not more than two knots. With a quiet, ‘“‘Aye, sir,” Dugan left the door of the skipper’s cabin, passed through the saloon and out on deck. A hoarse shout from the lookout aloft on the fore mast aroused him. “Land, sir!’ repeated the man, at his command. ‘Land! Dead ahead!” Not that it mattered. Even thirty years ago many sea lanes converged in Tampa Bay. At the worst it would not be long before a ship sighted them. Nothing mat- tered much, for Dugan had been on duty forty-eight hours straight. Vaguely he decided that the faint pencil. line across the horizon which marked land would be all of thirty miles away, probably; then he turned to these and other thoughts: ‘She is a good ship, except that she has been a better one, and she has a soul and a heart. Dummy’d scuttle her in a minute. Or some Cuban smack’Il salvage her, —— it! I will, by the saints! I will!’ Also he remembered that his father, an able navigator and a man among men, had been all his life a mate and never once a captain. Dugan wished a better fate than that. And even at twenty-eight he had CORnNICLO® (C©