In Hazard by Richard Hughes Read Free Book Online Page B

think apart, in urgent matters. The soaked tobacco and newspapers were as present in Edwardes’s mind as Buxton’s.
    â€œTry and secure No. 2 hatch,” he said. “Take everyone you can get.—Here, you Bennett” (to the dark thin boy), “stir out the seamen in the fo’c’sle, and take them along.”
    Buxton called the other boys to follow him, and struggled down the ladder: blind and deaf the moment he left the bridge, moving with as much difficulty as a weak baby.
    But the boys were newly out of shelter. The blast blinded them and deafened them, even on the bridge. Bennett just heard the captain’s order, and went about it: but the others neither heard the mate call them to follow him, nor even saw him go. They were filling up with air, as if their lungs were balloons being pumped; it made them feel giddy, and feckless—almost ready to giggle.
    Buxton did not know that: he thought they were with him. It was all he could do to make his own way to the fore well-deck: those behind must look after themselves. Thus he was down there before he discovered he was alone. Never mind: Bennett and the Chinamen would be along soon.
    Clinging in a doorway, he looked out. Mostly all he saw was shifting shafts and bars of spray—the course of the air grown solid and visible. Behind each obstacle showed something dark which looked like its shadow and was really its shelter, forming a hollow conical gap in the spray that outlined it in stream-line shapes: and where the wind rebounded against the plain opposition of something immovable, atomised spray fringed the edges like short fine hair. Yes, it was actually possible, by looking, to see the gaps in the air through which a man might insinuate his body, working his way towards the open hatch! Buxton, without waiting for help, put it to the test: climbing from shelter to shelter as a man on rock climbs from ledge to ledge. And, like a climber, he never thought of going back. In a minute or two he was there, crouched under the lee of the coaming; and as each volume of spray went below, he winced as if it fell on his own nerves.
    A man on a good ledge or rock can belay and stay there: but Buxton’s shelter under the coaming was not safety like that. He was protected from the wind; but the next sea which broke over the rail, as it might do any minute, would carry him away with it; for it would pour down this sloping deck like Niagara, there could be no hope of holding on. Even if he tied himself with a rope, the sea would batter him against iron things like an egg. And it might come any minute.
    Nor was there anything to be done, even if he had not been alone. The hatches were gone clean overboard. To carry large planks, by however many willing hands, for repairing them, through the narrow spaces between the wind, was impossible. They would have to wait for the central lull—and meanwhile the stability of the ship must take its chance. He had better get back, before a wave caught him.
    The hatches had gone overboard: but the tarpaulin, curiously, had not: it was pressed on the deck in a heap. Just as Buxton turned to creep away it leapt up, like a black wall. It hit him and knocked him down and covered him, flattening him to the deck under its stiff weight.
    Then the sea came. It burst over the rail—God knows how many tons. It roared down the deck, a fathom deep: its weight nearly crushed Buxton, under the tarpaulin—the stiff tarred canvas suddenly fitting his body like a mould. Then away to leeward, over the other rail; and the ship staggered and rose. Buxton, under the tarpaulin, was not only saved alive; he was almost dry.
    He crawled out, crushed and stupid, carelessly, so that the wind caught him. It was as if the climber on the cliff had slipped and fallen. The wind took him like gravity, and flung him to the centre-castle, where he crashed into the door from which he had started.
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    If nothing could be done on the