Wyllard was a little weary, and more depressed, but it was not until he sat in the stern cabin with its cheerful twinkling stove and swinging lamp that he understood how he had shrunk from that forbidding wilderness. His consultation with Dampier, who came in by and bye, was very brief.
"We'll head north for a couple of days, and try again," he said.
He crawled into his berth early, and it was some time after midnight when he was awakened by being rudely flung out of it. That fact, and the slant of deck and sounds above, suggested that the schooner had been hove down by a sudden gale. He had, however, grown more or less accustomed to occurrences of this kind and to sleeping fully dressed, and in another moment or two he was out of the deck-house. Then a wind that seemed sharp as steel drove stinging flakes of snow into his face. It was very dark, but he fancied that the schooner's rail was in the sea, which was washing over her to weather, and that some of the others were struggling to get the mainsail off her. Then a man whom he supposed to be Charly ran into him.
"Better come for'ard. Got to haul outer jib down before it blows away," he said.
Wyllard staggered after him up to his knees in water, and made out by the mad banging that some of them had already cast the peak of the boom-foresail loose. Then he reached the windlass, and clutched it as a sea that took him to the waist frothed in over the weather rail. The bows lurched out of it viciously, hurling another icy flood back on him, and he could see a dim white chaos about and beneath them. Over it rose the black wedge of the jibs.
He did not want to get out along the bowsprit to stop one of them down. Indeed his whole physical nature shrank from it, but there are many things flesh and blood shrink from which must be faced at sea. Then he made out that a Siwash was fumbling at the down-haul made fast near his side, and when his companion's shadowy figure rose up against the whiteness of the foam he made a jump forward. Then he was on the bowsprit, lying upon it while he felt for the foot-rope slung beneath. He found it, and was cautiously lowering himself when the man in front of him called out harshly, and he saw a white sea range up ahead. It broke short over with a rush and roar, and he clung with hands and feet for his life as the schooner's dipping bows rammed the seething mass.