Gordon Young

“ He turned to mount on to the rail.
Corydon clutched at his bare arm, whispering tensely: “Risk your life for rum!”
McGuire paused, with head over shoulder, and smiled, saying: “No. For gin.”
Gorvhalsen had heard. His laughter boomed. He threw a heavy hand on McGuire's shoulder approvingly and subsided into derisive chuckles at Corydon, whose face had become scarlet.
The boy was disappointed to the depths of his soul. In an unreasoning humiliated mood he felt that McGuire had turned against him. ”

“ In a second the instinct of a lifetime's use of the harpoon awakened within him and he snatched it from Brundage's hand, whipping a sheath-knife's edge to the line to escape the risk of a snarl, and bounding amidships, was climbing out on to the main channel in time to see McGuire streaking upward through the water straight for the shark.
Nothing could appear more pitifully hopeless to all who watched, except the Kanakas. They knew that a shark will run at least a little way if attacked head-on by a man in the water. ”

“ With slow placid movement the fish, deadly wounded, began to sink, its fins stirring slowly in a weak rotary motion; and its monster companion struck.
As the pack devours a wounded wolf, so the shark eats the unfortunate of its kind.
McGuire, panting and exhausted, was eagerly helped over the rail. Gorvhalsen, lifting him as a strong man lifts a little child, set him on the deck, praising him to his face. There was courage for anybody, said the great black-bearded giant. ”

“ He had been in many calms and knew that a good way to stir up wind was to catch a shark or have a sick man die. There were no sick men. Clobb had come out of his torture a few days before, dazed and weak, but rapidly recovered and was sullenly aloof from his mates.
Old Tom knew much of sea-lore. It was an unlucky ship, due for sudden disaster some time or other, that bucked the Horn at its stormiest without leaving an offering of seaman life to the waves of endless hunger. The sea demanded sacrifices of the men that sought its favor. ”

“ He turned again and with long overhand reaches cut up through the water, shooting out almost to his waist and gulping the air with a sob-like gasp heard all over the deck.
Yells and cheers went up; advice too. He was forty feet or more from the ship's side. Some one flung over the end of a line, but he did not reach for it.
They could not understand what he was about or why he did not make for the ship; and the men grew silent again, watching him. ”

“ Old Benny's harpoon sped wide of the mark.
Then the shark's white belly gleamed and it came a full third of its length out of the water with the buoy in its mouth; the buoy was bitten in two by jaws that had the pressure of mill-stones. Its great body swept glancingly against McGuire, rasping the skin from side and arm, knocking him as though he had been caught broadside in a breaker. His knife might as well have been a toothpick. The kind of sharks that fearless native swimmers kill are not sixteen-foot nurses.
A shark's spine may be severed; it will swim and fight and the wound heal ”

“ The men growled. They were, or thought they were, underfed.
“Them Chinks spoil what we do get anyhow,” Old Tom had said many times.
But the shark, with its shovel-like nose right up to the water's surface and its lidless eyes staring, waited watchfully, as though it had something that men could never guess in its head. Its fins scarcely moved.
“Now—twenty dollars,” said Gorvhalsen toward the Kanakas. ”

“ Apparently it had not seen him; but appearances were worth nothing. It may not be by sight, and it probably is not by smell, but some amazingly accurate sense keeps deep-water sharks aware of everything that goes on around them. ”