He stayed aloft for about ten minutes, and when he came down all hands knew it was to be desperate work that night.
“Put her about,” was his first order, and “Take a sounding, Martin,” his second.
She came about in the settling blackness and started for shoal water.
“You might’s well put her sidelights up,” he said next. “Nobody’ll get in our road to-night--nor we in anybody else’s--but we’ll go ship-shape. And what do you get?” he asked of Martin, when the lead came up.
“Eighteen fathom,” was the word from Martin. Eighteen fathom, and this a winter gale and a winter sea, and the strongest of tides against them!
“Eighteen fathom and goin’ into it straight’s ever a vessel c’n go,” said Oddie. “Wicked ’tis, but the one thing’ll make me laugh when we go----”
Oddie was at the wheel himself then, and the _Delia_ was beginning to feel the pounding. They could not see the sky at all, it was that black, but all around they could see the combers breaking white--so white that they made a kind of light of their own. And then it was, with the Lord knows how much wind behind them and seas mast-head high and the little vessel taking it fair abeam, that the crew of the _Delia_ and the crew of the _Eldorado_ guessed what was running in Patsie Oddie’s mind. He was to drive her across the bar! With all the sail in the _Delia_ on her, to let her take the full force of it and bang her across the shoals, where soon there would not be enough water to let her set up on an even keel!
Martin Carr was heaving the lead all the time, and all noted how he made himself heard when it came to ten fathom.
“Ten fathom!” the crew repeated, and murmured it over till one got courage to ask, “Is it going to drown us you are, Captain Oddie?”
“I’m trying to save you, boys,” he answered, and his voice was as tender as could be and yet be heard above a roaring gale.
“Nine and a half,” and then, “Nine fathom!” came from Martin Carr, barely able to hold his place by the rail, the vessel was pitching so.
It was at eight fathoms that Artie Orcutt raised a cry of protest, and, hearing that, Oddie ordered Martin to sound no more. “Bring the lead here, Martin,” said Oddie, and taking a big bait knife he always kept on the house, with one stroke cut the lead-line off short. Then he opened the slide of the cabin companion-way and hove the lead on to the cabin floor with a “There, now, maybe we _are_ goin’ to be lost. I think myself that maybe we will, but some of ye mayn’t die of fright now, anyway.”