“I thought you were in your boat.  Have you changed your mind?” asked Lingard in his deep voice close to Carter’s elbow.

Carter felt his way along the rail, till his hand found a line that seemed, in the calm, to stream out of its own accord into the darkness.  He hailed his boat, and directly heard the wash of water against her bows as she was hauled quickly under the counter.  Then he loomed up shapeless on the rail, and the next moment disappeared as if he had fallen out of the universe.  Lingard heard him say: 

“Catch hold of my leg, John.”  There were hollow sounds in the boat; a voice growled, “All right.”

“Keep clear of the counter,” said Lingard, speaking in quiet warning tones into the night.  “The brig may get a lot of sternway on her should this squall not strike her fairly.”

“Aye, aye.  I will mind,” was the muttered answer from the water.

Lingard crossed over to the port side, and looked steadily at the sooty mass of approaching vapours.  After a moment he said curtly, “Brace up for the port tack, Mr. Shaw,” and remained silent, with his face to the sea.  A sound, sorrowful and startling like the sigh of some immense creature, travelling across the starless space, passed above the vertical and lofty spars of the motionless brig.

It grew louder, then suddenly ceased for a moment, and the taut rigging of the brig was heard vibrating its answer in a singing note to this threatening murmur of the winds.  A long and slow undulation lifted the level of the waters, as if the sea had drawn a deep breath of anxious suspense.  The next minute an immense disturbance leaped out of the darkness upon the sea, kindling upon it a livid clearness of foam, and the first gust of the squall boarded the brig in a stinging flick of rain and spray.  As if overwhelmed by the suddenness of the fierce onset, the vessel remained for a second upright where she floated, shaking with tremendous jerks from trucks to keel; while high up in the night the invisible canvas was heard rattling and beating about violently.

Then, with a quick double report, as of heavy guns, both topsails filled at once and the brig fell over swiftly on her side.  Shaw was thrown headlong against the skylight, and Lingard, who had encircled the weather rail with his arm, felt the vessel under his feet dart forward smoothly, and the deck become less slanting—­the speed of the brig running off a little now, easing the overturning strain of the wind upon the distended surfaces of the sails.  It was only the fineness of the little vessel’s lines and the perfect shape of her hull that saved the canvas, and perhaps the spars, by enabling the ready craft to get way upon herself with such lightning-like rapidity.  Lingard drew a long breath and yelled jubilantly at Shaw who was struggling up against wind and rain to his commander’s side.

“She’ll do.  Hold on everything.”