Peter Duck

by Arthur Ransome

  And still the wind freshened and died away, freshened and died away without ever blowing hard enough to worry Black Jake, who was crowding on every bit of canvas he had, and with every hour was making the distance less between the Viper and the Wild Cat. The little green-hulled schooner that had slipped out of his clutches once was not, if he could help it, going to escape him again.

  Nearer the Viper came and nearer yet. The little company about the wheel of the Wild Cat could see, even without using the glasses, that there were men looking forward from the black schooner’s bows. One of her jibs had gone and had been replaced with a smaller one, but that hardly mattered with a slack wind that swung from south-west through west to north-west and back again. Her topsails alone, high aloft, were enough to give her the mastery over the Wild Cat, which, even with all sails set, had never been a match for her unless in half a gale.

  At last Mr Duck’s topsail was ready. “It’s a poor job,” he said, “but it’ll be better up there than a bare pole. Come on, Bill, and let’s have it up. And will you lend a hand, Cap’n Nancy? Cap’n John’ll look after the wheel.”

  “She’s going better already,” cried Titty, as the topsail spread and stiffened between the mast and the gaff of the mainsail. “Oh, if only we had another for the foremast!”

  It was just then that Peter Duck first saw the waterspout. He was walking aft, looking astern to the Viper. Crab Island was already out of sight.

  “Where are them glasses?” he said.

  Titty handed them over.

  “I was thinking there was some dirty weather still to come,” he said. “Look away there now. Call up the skipper.”

  Far astern, right away on the horizon, where the sea met the sky, a narrow band of light showed under the black cloud that stretched above it, hard-edged as a bar of iron. And across that narrow band of light a thin black thread seemed to join the cloud to the sea.

  Captain Flint came up in a hurry when Nancy shouted down to him.

  “Do you know what that is, sir?” asked Peter Duck.

  “Looks like a waterspout,” said Captain Flint. “I’ve seen them in the Indian Ocean. Let’s get the telescope on it. Yes. It’s a waterspout, all right. That may mean a bit of wind. By Jove, it’s moving pretty fast.”

  “Coming up this way,” said Peter Duck.

  Roger was busy with the little telescope, so busy that he had not seen what the others were looking at. He was trying to get the little telescope properly focused on the Viper.

  “What are they doing on the foredeck?” he said.

  “Look at the waterspout, Rogie, and then let me have a look.” Titty had parted with the glasses to Peter Duck.

  “They’re awfully near,” said Roger, “and they’re doing something on her foredeck.”

  “I say, Uncle Jim,” said Peggy, “if the Viper does catch us up, what can they really do?”

  “They can’t do anything,” said Captain Flint. “Not anything that matters.”

  Bill opened his mouth and shut it again. Peter Duck looked oddly at Captain Flint, and then glanced round the horizon ahead of them.

  “We’re not anywhere near the regular shipping routes,” he was saying to himself, but Titty heard him.

  “Why should we be?” she said.

  Peter Duck looked at her without smiling.

  “Company,” he said.

  Captain Flint looked astern at the Viper.

  “Yes. I wouldn’t mind falling in with another vessel just now.”

  But there was not a ship in sight, besides the Wild Cat and the Viper, and the distance between them was steadily growing less.

  “The waterspout’s going to pass quite close to us,” said Nancy. “It’s coming along at a tremendous lick.”

  That thread of dark colour between cloud and sea was thicker now. The cloud itself seemed now to roof the sky. The waterspout was changing its shape with every moment. It was like a tremendous indiarubber tube joining sky and sea. It widened at the top where it met the cloud, and the bottom of it spread out like a base of a candlestick.

  “It’s twirling like a corkscrew,” said Titty.

  “They do that,” said Peter Duck. There was something in his voice that startled Captain Flint.

  The thing was now near enough to hear. A wild, shrill, rustling noise swept over the sea. The grey waves were white with foam under this twirling, swaying, monstrous pillar that was coming nearer and nearer, dancing as it seemed across the troubled water.

  “That’ll give them something to think of,” said Captain Flint. “That thing’s got wind with it, and the Viper won’t stand topsails in a wind, you said, didn’t you, Mr Duck?”

  “Aye, sir,” said Peter Duck, and still his eyes were on the waterspout.

  They saw the white spray leap from under the bows of the Viper as a gust of wind stronger than any they had had that day suddenly lifted her on her way. A moment later they felt the wind themselves, and Captain Flint glanced up at the newly mended topsail.

  “It looks to me as if we’ll be glad to have our own topsail down again in a few minutes,” he said. “There’s a real wind coming.”

  But Peter Duck said nothing. He was watching the advancing waterspout, twirling towards them across white, wind-whipped water.

  “It’s coming right at us,” said Peggy, and her voice rose with the words until it startled her and she wondered if the others had heard the fear in it.

  “Close all hatches!” Captain Flint suddenly saw how very near the waterspout was going to pass them. “Close the forehatch, will you, Bill? Shut down the skylights.”

  “If that thing hits us it isn’t hatches’ll save us,” said Peter Duck quietly. “Smashed to match-boarding we’ll be, with that weight of water on top of us.”

  But Bill had already darted forward.

  A moment later something happened which, for a moment, startled them so much that even the waterspout was forgotten.

  “We must have that topsail down again, Mr Duck,” Captain Flint was saying. “There’s more than a summer squall coming with this thing …”

  CRACK!

  What was that puff of pale smoke by the stem of the black schooner that was driving after them with the white foam flying from her bows?

  A shrill whine passed close between Titty and Mr Duck. There was a sharp thud and the noise of splintering wood somewhere right forward.

  John and Nancy looked at each other. Again! They remembered last night. The Swallow was not the only vessel to get a bullet in her.

  “They’re shooting at us,” said Roger. “I wondered what it was they were getting ready to do.”

  Captain Flint took the wheel from John.

  “Go below, the lot of you,” he said. “The drunken scoundrels! And us with children aboard!”

  “It was no drunken man fired that, I’m thinking,” said Peter Duck, and still his eyes were on the waterspout, not on the schooner.

  CRACK!

  A bullet whined close over their heads. There was a rending noise aloft. The newly mended topsail burst at the leech. The gaff came down with a run, and swung against the mast. The boom dropped, and would have crashed down on the rail if its fall had not been broken by the topping lifts.

  “Think of that fellow,” said Captain Flint, “having the luck to cut the peak halyard with a bullet.”

  No one had stirred of the little group about the wheel. All, except Roger, who still had the telescope focused on the Viper, were looking up at the wreckage that a single shot, cutting a single rope, had made of the Wild Cat’s mainsail.

  “Done our reefing for us,” said Peter Duck grimly. “And there’s a day’s work in that topsail. Well, it’s no great odds. Look at that!”

  The crippled Wild Cat was losing her way, while a tremendous wind was hurling the Viper along in a smother of white foam, her topmasts bending like reeds. But it was not at the Viper that Peter Duck was looking.

  There were new deafening noises in the air, the sound of great waterfalls,
the sound of a hurricane over the sea. The waterspout, now a whirling column of dark water, thicker than a house, and many hundred feet high, was rushing upon them. The sea about its base was churned white, and out of the white the dark pillar twisted up and up until it spread again into the roofing cloud.

  “It’s coming right over us,” said Peggy.

  And then, suddenly, they saw that it was not.

  “Look! look!” shrilled Roger.

  Both masts of the Viper broke off short, one after the other. Almost in the same moment the waterspout was upon her, seeming at once to suck her up into itself and to tear her to pieces. Of them all, Roger was the only one who was quite sure what he had seen. The others had seen a waterspout and, close beside it, a schooner suddenly overwhelmed and dismasted by a mighty wind. Then they had seen a waterspout and no schooner. Then, before their eyes, the whirling column of water began to narrow in the middle. It grew narrower, still narrower, until it seemed to twist itself in two, and the upper part, still whirling, was drawn up into the cloud, while the lower fell thunderously back into the sea. They saw a mass of water leap up again into the air, and drop, and then there was a gigantic whirling hollow in the sea, as if the water was being run off after a giant’s bath. The hollow filled up, and there was nothing left to show where the waterspout had been. There was no waterspout, and there was no longer any Viper. The Wild Cat was alone, tearing along under nothing but trysail and headsails.

  Everything had happened so fast, from the firing of that shot that had brought the mainsail down, to the overwhelming of the Viper by that colossal mass of whirling water, that no one had had time to stir. The children, who had been told to go below when the first bullet whistled past them, were still on deck, staring at each other as if to make sure that all of them had seen this monstrous thing. For a few seconds Captain Flint and Peter Duck were as silent as their crew. Then, as the Wild Cat was caught in the outer edges of the whirlwind that had made and carried the waterspout, Peter Duck rushed round the deckhouse, to the mainmast, lowered away the throat, and, as the heavy gaff swung outwards, brought the whole tangle down on deck.

  “Haul in on the trysail sheet,” yelled Captain Flint, “and get the staysail off her.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Nancy.

  “Go back to pick them up,” said Captain Flint.

  But the best sailor in the world is hampered when his mainboom is lying over the side, and his mainsail is useless, his peak halyard gone, and he tries to come to the wind in a hurry with a small trysail on the foremast and two big headsails. The man who had fired that second shot from the Viper had made the Wild Cat all but unmanageable. And yet perhaps the Wild Cat had reason to be grateful to him. Perhaps that sudden loss of topsail and mainsail had saved her from losing a mast as the Viper had lost both of hers. In that first fury of the wind that had come with the waterspout the Wild Cat had run on safely under her shortened canvas. But now that Captain Flint wanted to bring her about and go back to pick up the Viper’s crew, time was lost because he could do nothing at all until Peter Duck had brought the swinging gaff of the mainsail safely down on deck. As soon as that was done Captain Flint tried to haul his wind and come about to cruise over the place where only a few minutes before there had been a black schooner and men with no other thought in their minds but murder and revenge.

  Peter Duck hauled in on the trysail sheet, and shouted for help.

  “Bill,” he shouted, “lower away the staysail! Bill, lower away there! Stir yourself!”

  But poor Bill was sitting by the forehatch, leaning against the capstan and holding his left arm in his right hand. As the vessel came round to the wind and heeled over, his head slipped sideways, and, full-length now, he slid across the deck in a faint.

  Nancy and Susan at the same moment had seen that something was wrong, and were running forward. John was hurrying after them.

  “Lower away that staysail!” shouted Captain Flint, wondering what was happening there to prevent the staysail coming down, as the Wild Cat slammed suddenly into a wave and a great cloud of spray lifted over her bows and soused Bill and those who had come to help him.

  “Lower away now!” said Peter Duck, shoving the staysail halyard into John’s hand. “Ship comes first. Lower away, now, and I’ll smother the sail.” The wild thrashing of loose canvas added itself to the noises of the wind and of the Wild Cat thumping into short, steep seas.

  The spray brought Bill to himself. Now he opened his eyes to see Susan and Nancy bending over him.

  “What’s happened?” asked Susan.

  “They’ve shot him,” cried Nancy.

  “What’s ado?” said Peter Duck.

  Bill smiled happily through his pain.

  “Less lip,” he murmured, and then, trying to move, turned very white.

  “It was the forehatch,” he said. “That first shot. Broke my arm … All right … I saw the waterspout. I saw ’em go.” And he fainted again.

  “His arm’s broke all right,” said Peter Duck, tenderly turning back the sleeve when he saw how the arm was hanging. “Broke, but there’s no bullet here.”

  “Look at the hatch,” said John. A piece of wood had been knocked clean off it. Bill had been closing the hatch in fear of the waterspout, and his arm had been snapped, either by the blow of the bullet on the hatch or by the knocked-off bit of wood. No one would ever know for certain how it had happened, for Bill himself had known nothing but a sudden, violent blow on the forearm.

  Peter Duck said no more, but picked Bill up in his arms, and carried him aft to the deckhouse. Susan hurried below for her First Aid box.

  “What’s happened to him?” asked Captain Flint.

  “That first bullet broke his arm,” said John.

  “He’s wounded,” said Nancy.

  “Oh, Bill!” said Titty.

  “It might have been a lot worse,” said Peter Duck, coming out again, after laying Bill in his own bunk. “But those fellows that did that don’t deserve no picking up.”

  “It doesn’t look to me as if they’re going to get any,” said Captain Flint grimly. “No human being could live in the sea there was here when that spout broke. We must be pretty near the spot. There’s a bit of wreckage, but no sign of those scoundrels. Not now. If they’d left our mainsail alone and not done that bit of fancy shooting we might have been a bit quicker.”

  “It’s my belief,” said Peter Duck, “that if they’d not done that shooting the waterspout would have missed them, same as it did us. Those fellows in that ship, they was fairly asking the Devil to take his own, and he’s done it, and I think the better of him. Shooting like that at a ship full of children!”

  To and fro Captain Flint sailed the Wild Cat, under trysail and jib, to and fro over that wind-tossed water where the Viper had last been seen. They saw fragments of deckplanking, a painted lifebuoy, a broken mast in a tangle of rigging, and other flotsam. But though they cruised there until dusk, and though all hands, except poor Bill, and Peter Duck, who was very busy, were carefully searching the water, they saw no sign of any living thing, no sign even that there had ever been a living thing on the schooner that had come to so sudden and so terrible an end.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  “BONIES” AND “MALLIES”

  PETER DUCK HAD not been sorry to have no chance of picking up Black Jake and his friends. They had been aboard the Wild Cat once, and it would be a week at least before he stopped feeling the bruises on his jaw and the back of his head. One visit from such folk was one too many. He did not want another. Anyway, he said, they could not have lived long in that swirl of heavy water. If the skipper thought he must look for them, well and good, but the old seaman had hardly glanced over the side. He had plenty to do clearing the wreckage on deck. The moment that was done he had set to work to cut a couple of wooden splints for the setting of Bill’s broken arm. That was the next job that mattered. He had lit the lamp in the deckhouse. He had finished roughing out the splints, and now he spok
e to Captain Flint.

  “The sooner we sets about that doctoring job the better, sir.”

  Captain Flint called John and Nancy to take the wheel.

  “If there’s the least hint of another squall coming up,” he said, “give me a shout. Peggy, Titty, and Roger will help to keep a sharp look out. You’ll hear a squall before it comes. Anyhow, she’s got no sail to speak of. I want Susan in the deckhouse to help Mr Duck and me with the bandages.”

  Not a word was spoken by the others to the two captains as they steadied the wheel, watched the compass through its little window, and kept the Wild Cat, under small jib and trysail, reaching away northward in the dusk. Not a word was spoken by the captains. Everybody was thinking of the deckhouse as a hospital, an operating-room. They had seen Bill’s white face when he had fainted with the pain of his broken arm, and now, though they did not want to listen, they could not talk, and every moment were afraid that from inside the deckhouse would come some groan or sigh or other sound that would show that the pain was more than he could bear.

  But, for all the noise he made, Bill might not have been in the deckhouse at all. They heard Peter Duck talking of the way a broken arm properly set is often stronger than it was before, and they heard him telling of how he had had both arms broken at once when he had been carried off his feet and thrown into the scuppers by a green sea coming aboard. And then they heard Captain Flint’s voice. “Steady. Keep just so. It shouldn’t hurt now. Next bandage, Susan. Get the end unrolled. Pins.” But they never heard a word from Bill. And then Captain Flint’s voice came again, louder, more confident. “Good lad, Bill. I couldn’t have stuck that without squeaking. You’ll be right as rain now if you don’t get those splints shifted. But you’ll have to eat with one hand for a bit. And you’ll have to sleep up here. No climbing up and down until that arm’s set. You and I must swop cabins for a few days.”