Secret sea;

  "Okay, I got her."

  Pete grinned. "Good."

  For a little while after he got into his bunk, he worried about Mike, imagining all sorts of mistakes the kid could make up there. But very soon he was fast asleep.

  Pete woke up, looked at his watch, and came

  THE BLACK SLOOP

  vaulting out of the bunk. With nothing on but his skivvy pants he raced through the Uttered cabin and up the companionway.

  Mike was sitting on the wheelbox steering with both bare feet. The wind was strong and gusty but Mike seemed perfectly calm as the Indra bucketed along, gray water swirling in and out of the lee scupper.

  "Fm sorry, Mike. Didn't mean to sleep so long. Why didn't you buzz me?"

  "If rd needed you, FdVe buzzed you, Mac," Mike told him. Pete got his clothes on and came back. "How are you at cook-he asked lieved Mike at the wheel.

  7^^m.^

  SECRET SEA

  Mike looked at him. "I'm the best," he said. "I can make a rich soup out of bones a dog wouldn't bury."

  "No use straining yourself," Pete said. "But we'd better eat now before it gets too rough to cook."

  In half an hour Mike was back with dinner. He had soup, potatoes, string beans, pork chops with onions, and bread. "Anything left?" Pete asked.

  "Turnips," Mike said.

  As they ate Pete watched some porpoises playing around the bow of the Indra, The taffrail log was clicking over fast and occasionally they had to duck spray curling over the weather bow.

  "This would be fun if we didn't know what was coming," Mike remarked. "How hard do you think it's going to blow?"

  "Hard," Pete said. "You'd better turn in— we'll both be up all night."

  The afternoon passed, the wind growing stronger all the time. It seemed to drain the dark blue color out of the Gulf Stream and to leave it a dirty, foaming gray. Around five o'clock Mike came back into the cockpit.

  "We'll shorten sail in a little while," Pete said when he saw Mike look up at the spread of fair-weather canvas. "But I want to put as many miles as I can between us and that buzzard."

  THE BLACK SLOOP

  Mike glanced at Pete. "What's the pitch, Mac?"

  Pete told him the story of rescuing the Cuban and the log of the Santa Ybel, "I know where it is," he ended.

  "What about old Skinny? Does he know too?"

  "He knows that the Santa Ybel went down with a holdful of gold, but doesn't know exactly where. If he did, he wouldn't be trying to steal the log from me."

  "So he'll follow us?" Mike said.

  "Yep. But he won't find us. This is a big area."

  "Has he got a boat?"

  Pete nodded. "A black sloop. Looks seaworthy and fast. Marconi rigged. One of those racing jobs."

  Mike said slowly, "A piece of gold as big as an oxcart wheel. How much is that in money, mate?"

  "I don't know. But it ought to be worth a lot to a museum."

  "You mean we don't melt her down and get some dough for it?"

  "A museum'U buy it. There's a lot of other stuflF." Pete grinned at him. "Dorrt worry, fish-face. If we get it, we won't have to bother with digging up dog bones for soup any more."

  "I don't much care one way or the other," Mike said. "As long as the food holds out. I

  SECRET SEA

  haven't eaten this regular since they let me out of school."

  "Where'd you go to school?" Pete asked. "I went to a little institution called a reform school," Mike said. ^*Oh."

  "Yeah, 'Oh.' I learned a lot of things in that joint, Mac. I learned how to control a honest pair of dice. I learned how to change the numbers on automobile engines and pick ignition locks. I learned some reading and writing too. But I was only in for a year."

  "What they put you in for?" Pete asked. "I just happened to be in a grocery store when the cops busted in the front door. The other guy with me was a fat slouch and got stuck in the window going out." "Too bad."

  "I didn't mind it," Mike said. "We ate good up at school, and I didn't take much of a kicking around."

  "How old are you, Mike?" Pete asked. "Fifteen or sixteen, I guess. Anyway, old enough to know better than crash a store with another fat guy."

  A squall whistled down the deck, and Pete eased her. "We'll shorten sail when this one dies," he yelled to Mike.

  As the wind died, Pete started forward but

  THE BLACK SLOOP

  Mike yelled something and he stopped. Mike was pointing back into the gray sky.

  Pete looked aft. Against the wall of sea and sky the triangle of a tall sail stood out white and almost glistening.

  Without saying anything Pete got the long 8X50 binoculars out of the watertight case and turned them on the sail. Slowly he moved the glasses down the long, slim mast until, as the hull of the boat was lifted up by a roller, he could see her black paint shining with water. Pete put the binoculars down, unwrapping the strap from his wrist.

  "Is it?" Mike asked.

  Pete nodded.

  "That skinny drink of water is a smart sailor," Mike said.

  "No. Vm a dumb one," Pete said bitterly. "I came right down the groove on the Havana course."

  "Well, what do we do?" Mike asked. "That boat he's got can sail circles around this one."

  Pete nodded in agreement. "Except—I think we can crack on harder in heavy weather than he can. . .. Let's find out."

  "You going to leave this canvas on?" Mike asked, his voice low.

  Pete nodded. "And fly some more. We'll put the topsails on her."

  Mike looked at him dubiously. "We won't

  SECRET SEA

  look so good when the masts blow out," he said.

  "That's a chance we'll have to take. If we can outrun him until dark we can lose him during the night. If we don't. . . we'll have to sail around and around until we do, and we can't, Mike— there isn't that much time."

  "Hold your hat," Mike said.

  A rain squall swept them as they got the topsails rigged and let them break out of the small stuff lashings. The Indra reeled under the impact of the wind in the high sails, and Pete had to ease her off as the lee rail sizzled under the water and waves swirled around the cabin house.

  Mike wrapped a hand in the glasses loop and looked back as the rain cleared. "Still coming," he said.

  "What's he got on it?" Pete asked.

  "Jib, flying jib, and main."

  "Watch him for a while and see how he's do-ing."

  The Indra, her expanse of sail filled and driving, tore into the seas. The dolphin striker plunged down deep, burying the outboard bowsprit, and when she struggled up Pete could see the triatics go taut as bowstrings. He hated to drive her this way and waited for Mike to tell him whether he was gaining or losing.

  Then Mike said, "Oh, oh. He's breaking out a club topsail, mate."

  Pete's heart sank as he turned his head for a

  THE BLACK SLOOP

  moment to see the topsail fill out like a huge balloon on the mast of the sloop.

  Then Mike chuckled. **Can't take it. He's furling the flying jib." Mike wiped spray off the binocular lenses and looked again. "Mate, we might as well furl 'em," Mike said slowly. ''He's breaking out a balloon jib on us. He'll be alongside in about ten minutes."

  'Tray for that storm," Pete said. *'Go stick a knife in the mainmast, Mike."

  Mike looked at him. "Are you crazy? I wouldn't do that even in a dead calm. What do you want, a hurricane?"

  "I could use a piece of one," Pete said. "Let me see."

  Pete looked aft with the glasses, and the image leaping at him made him draw in his breath. The sloop had gained a mile on them since they had flown the topsails. The whole front of the sloop was hidden behind the tremendous canvas wall the balloon jib formed and all Pete could see was the welter of white water as the boat drove toward them.

  He handed the glasses back to Mike. Spray was coming in flying sheets, and he licked the salt water off his lips and squinted his eyes against it. All around
the horizon now the sky was right down on the sea like a gray wall, the wind was whining like a pack of dogs in the stainless rigging and, below the topside sounds, Pete could

  SECRET SEA

  hear the old Indra complaining in her wooden bones.

  Pete's body was tense as it swayed and jerked to the rough movement of the pounding ship. With every muscle he was trying to help the Indra,

  **How're we doing?" he yelled.

  "Standing still," Mike yelled back. "He's gaining fast. I can see people aboard her now. Three of 'em anyway."

  Pete would not look back as he kept on driving his ship. A sword blade of black cloud swung away from the wall of the sky and curved toward the two racing boats. In the driving wind Pete could feel the heavier wind coming, and he braced himself, wondering if the Indra could take it when it got there.

  The wind struck like a sledge hammer. The fore-topsail on the Indra blew out with a crack like a cannon shot, and the shreds of sail flew straight out and almost stiff in the screaming wind. Waves, gray and racing, foam blowing horizontally off the tops of them, mauled the ship and buried her in foaming water. The bow of the Indra, going down like an express elevator from the top of the crests, would drive hard into the body of the next wave and then rear like a wild horse, throwing solid water back the entire length of the ship.

  Pete clung to the wheel, gasping for breath and

  THE BLACK SLOOP

  trying to look up at the straining canvas. The walls of water were breaking against him, almost tearing him away from the wheel, but he did not ease her.

  Then Pete felt Mike's hands on him and looked down. Mike was passing a half-inch rope around his waist and making it fast to a bitt. Afterward Mike tied a rope around his own waist.

  Then the rain came. Pete had never felt rain like that before even in the typhoons off the Philippines. It didn't fall, it was driven straight across the sea by the wind and had the force of bird shot. It was impossible to keep his eyes open, or even keep his head up against it, but he never eased her, sailing by the feel of the deck under his bare feet and the wheel against his hands and arms.

  Th squall died almost as fast as it had started. The rain dribbled away and they were suddenly back in the dim, darkening world.

  Mike wiped off the binoculars and looked aft. Then he slumped down beside Pete.

  **They look like an old-rags-and-bottles man," Mike said, relief in his voice. "They're bare-poled except for tatters."

  Pete looked back and then swung the Indra up into the wind. "Take her," he said. "We'll reef her down."

  In half an hour they had a triple reef in the main, double in the fore, and a storm jib of heavy

  SECRET SEA

  canvas forward. The Indra seemed to sigh with reUef as Pete swung her about and the shortened sail filled with the heavy wind.

  Pete turned on the binnacle light as darkness came down like a blanket and then sat looking at the dim yellow face of the compass while Mike steered.

  "We're in a bight/' he said to Mike. "I'd like to make a 90-degree change of course and really foul them up, but we need sea room too badly. I don't want to wake up in the morning with Cuban palm trees leaning in the portholes."

  "How about beating her up as long as we can? That's the last thing they'd think we'd do in weather like this."

  "Good idea, Mike. I'd much rather have those jokers in front of us than behind us."

  All night long, as the storm gathered its strength, Pete and Mike nursed the Indra on the beat to windward. It was hard, nerve-racking work. The black squalls struck them without warning, whirling down out of the black night, and many times they thought a mast was coming out before they could get the bow up into the squall.

  Dawn wasn't much different from night and it was eight in the morning before they could call it day, for the sky was gray-black with cloud, rain squalls swept at intervals across the sea, there was only a gloomy light from the sun.

  THE BLACK SLOOP

  Pete, his eyes burned red with salt and lack of sleep, protected the chart from spray as he walked the dividers on it. Then he shoved it back into the waterproof slide and came to sit down beside Mike.

  "If they kept on the same course they were on, they're thirty miles away and to port of us and getting farther away all the time. If we don't see them by noon, I think we can count 'em as lost."

  "They couldn't see us in this stuff more'n half a mile—less than that," Mike said.

  Pete looked out at the world which seemed to have closed in in a gray ring right around the Indra,

  He grinned slowly. "That squall saved us."

  Mike laughed, salt water running into his mouth. "There wasn't a sail flying on that sloop." Then he looked at Pete. "This is a pretty good old tub," he said.

  Pete nodded. "I'm glad to get rid of that bird," he said slowly.

  Trapped

  L he storm howled on. Pete, using the radio compass to get an accurate record of where he was in the wild ocean, kept the Indra going east for sea room all morning. She was reefed all the way down with a small storm jib forward so that she made little headway. On the other hand, the shortened sail did not put much strain on her, and she rode nearly upright except in the hard, hammering squalls.

  124

  i^i^itUi^

  TRAPPED

  It was miserable work for the helmsman. Pete, in foul-weather gear—breeches, coat, sou'wester, and rubber boots—was still wet through to the skin. Although the pounding of the Indra when they were cracking on had now stopped, a lot of water was still being whipped by the wind from the bows straight aft so that Pete was continually lashed by it. In addition to this, the frequent hard squalls brought a deluge of cold rain to plague him.

  The world around him was a gray mess. In that shallow water the waves were enormous and seemed to fence him in with roaring walls which, when one careened, its top sizzling, past the boat, another instantly reared up to take its place. The Indra*s motion in the sea was sickening and violent. She would go straight up, on an even keel, as though something had exploded under her and then, as the wave ran out from under her, she would drop with a sick, twisting motion and crash into the trough. Or she would stagger up, her bow in the sky, and then tremble and writhe until her bow suddenly rocked straight down and she slid with awful speed down the front of a fast-moving wave. Or she would do it all backward. She rolled until Pete sometimes thought she was going over. She rolled until the cabin house sizzled with water around the skylights and dripped water below. She rolled until the crosstrees dipped into the sea. Pete, lashed to the

  SECRET SEA

  ship with a Hne, steered her with his feet braced against the wheelbox, his knees clamping it as he would clamp a bucking horse.

  In the middle of all this, Mike came staggering up the companion ladder, falling from side to side, balancing on each step and bracing himself with knees and elbows. In each hand he had an enormous sandwich.

  He lurched across the cockpit and fell, sitting, beside Pete.

  He held up one of the sandwiches. "Here," he said.

  Pete looked at the thing, the bread already damp with spray, the insides of the sandwich leaking and dripping and squeezing out.

  "No, thanks," Pete said. Inside his mouth there was a sudden gush of cold liquid, and his stomach seemed to rise up and then fall slowly over backward and slither down again. When Mike withdrew the sandwich, Pete felt a little better. But when Mike took a huge bite of his own, a bite which caused the red and yellow and gray inside of the sandwich to ooze out, Pete had to look up at the topmast as his stomach did another slow roll.

  "You'd better take those things below before Dagwood sees them," Pete decided.

  Mike looked up at him, shreds of sandwich from ear to ear. "Thought you were a big strong Navy man."

  TRAPPED

  "Naval Reserve, son. Take 'em below."

  Mike got up reluctantly and started below. Halfway across the cockpit he turned. "When I come back, Til tell you something
funny," he said. "It's about a man who tied an oyster to a string and swallowed it and then pulled it up again."

  ''Go belowr Pete yelled.

  Mike, laughing like an idiot, staggered back down the companion ladder.

  Pete's stomach settled down again, and the wild gushing in his mouth stopped. At the end of the hour he pulled in the counter of the taff rail log and took the hourly reading. As he entered it in the log, he saw that, even under storm canvas, the Indra was making three knots. In two more hours, Pete figured, he would have enough sea room for three more days of the battering wind, and he knew that very few storms in that area lasted for more than four days. As he sat down again, he felt suddenly contented and happy.

  He thought of the man and the black sloop. Weber had been completely eluded, Pete decided. He was now, probably, sailing all over the Gulf looking for the Indra, but his chances of just stumbling on her were very remote.

  Pete thought of the squall which had saved them and smiled, salt water running into his mouth. He looked forward along his ship as she staggered up the back of a wave, and a warm

  SECRET SEA

  feeling of pride rose in him. Maybe she was what Mike called her, *'an old tub/' but she had certainly outfought and outsailed the slick sloop. The old tub was a seagoing ship, Pete decided, and could take it. And he was glad that he had spent the extra money to put the heavy rigging on her. If he hadn't, he thought, when that squall banged them, the hrdra would have come up with her masts out—just slopping around helplessly and at the mercy of Weber and his gang of hoodlums.

  With the ship moving violently but steadily and without too much strain, Pete had time to do a little sober thinking. What did Weber plan to do? he asked himself. Because he was sure that Weber had not given up and he was equally sure that Weber was an intelligent enemy. Pete had learned a bitter lesson in the Navy—don't underestimate your opponent—so he concentrated on Weber now.