“I noticed your face was less yellow than usual,” Grimshaw sneered.  “It must have gone to your heart.”

Captain Doane breathed a great sigh.  His relief was too strong to permit him to join in the squabbling.

“You’re yellow,” Grimshaw went on, “yellow clean through.”  He nodded his head toward the Ancient Mariner.  “Now there’s the real thing as a man.  No yellow in him.  He never batted an eye, and I reckon he knew more about the danger than you did.  If I was to choose being wrecked on a desert island with him or you, I’d take him a thousand times first.  If—­”

But a cry from the sailors interrupted him.

“Merciful God!” Captain Doane breathed aloud.

The great cow whale had turned about, and, on the surface, was charging straight back at them.  Such was her speed that a bore was raised by her nose like that which a Dreadnought or an Atlantic liner raises on the sea.

“Hold fast, all!” Captain Doane roared.

Every man braced himself for the shock.  Henrik Gjertsen, the sailor at the wheel, spread his legs, crouched down, and stiffened his shoulders and arms to hand-grips on opposite spokes of the wheel.  Several of the crew fled from the waist to the poop, and others of them sprang into the main-rigging.  Daughtry, one hand on the rail, with his free arm clasped the Ancient Mariner around the waist.

All held.  The whale struck the Mary Turner just aft of the fore-shroud.  A score of things, which no eye could take in simultaneously, happened.  A sailor, in the main rigging, carried away a ratline in both hands, fell head-downward, and was clutched by an ankle and saved head-downward by a comrade, as the schooner cracked and shuddered, uplifted on the port side, and was flung down on her starboard side till the ocean poured level over her rail.  Michael, on the smooth roof of the cabin, slithered down the steep slope to starboard and disappeared, clawing and snarling, into the runway.  The port shrouds of the foremast carried away at the chain-plates, and the fore-topmast leaned over drunkenly to starboard.

“My word,” quoth the Ancient Mariner.  “We certainly felt that.”

“Mr. Jackson,” Captain Doane commanded the mate, “will you sound the well.”

The mate obeyed, although he kept an anxious eye on the whale, which had gone off at a tangent and was smoking away to the eastward.

“You see, that’s what you get,” Grimshaw snarled at Nishikanta.

Nishikanta nodded, as he wiped the sweat away, and muttered, “And I’m satisfied.  I got all I want.  I didn’t think a whale had it in it.  I’ll never do it again.”

“Maybe you’ll never have the chance,” the captain retorted.  “We’re not done with this one yet.  The one that charged the Essex made charge after charge, and I guess whale nature hasn’t changed any in the last few years.”

“Dry as a bone, sir,” Mr. Jackson reported the result of his sounding.