Excerpt
MAROONED BY A WHALE
"There she blows!"
Colin Dare, who was sitting beside the broken whale-gun and who had been promised that he might go in the boat that would be put out from the ship if a whale were sighted, jumped to his feet at the cry from the 'barrel' at the masthead.
"Where?" he shouted eagerly, rushing to the rail and staring as hard as he could at the heaving gray waters of the Behring Sea.
"There she blo-o-ows!" again cried the lookout, in the long echoing call of the old-time whaler, and stretching out his hand, he pointed to a spot in the ocean about three points off the starboard bow. Colin's glance followed the direction, and almost immediately he saw the faint cloud of vapor which showed that a whale had just spouted.
"Do you suppose that's a whalebone whale, Hank?" asked the boy, turning to a lithe Yankee sea-dog with a scraggy gray beard who had been busily working over the mechanism of the whale-gun.
"No sayin'," was the cautious reply, "we're too fur off to be able to tell yet a while. How fur away do you reckon we be?"
"A mile or two, I suppose," Colin said, "but we ought to catch up with the whale pretty soon, oughtn't we?"
"That depends," the gunner answered, "on whether the whale's willin' or not. He ain't goin' to stay, right there."
"But you usually do catch up?"
"If it's a 'right' whale we generally try to, an' havin' steam to help us out makes a pile o' difference. Now, in the ol' days, I've seen a dozen whales to wind'ard an' we couldn't get to 'em at all. By the time we'd beaten 'round to where they'd been sighted, they were gone."
"Well, I hope this is a 'right' whale," Colin said with emphatic earnestness.
"Why this one 'specially?" the old sailor asked.
"I heard Captain Murchison say that if we came up with a whale while the gun was out of order, rather than lose a chance, he would send a boat out in the old-fashioned way."
"An' you want to see how it's done, eh?"
"I got permission to go in the boat!" the boy answered triumphantly, "and I just can't wait."
"It's the skipper's business, I suppose, but I don't hold with takin' any chances you don't have to," was the gruff comment, "an' if you'll take the advice of an old hand at the game you'll keep away."
"But I want to go so much, Hank," came the reply.
"What for?"
"I'm trying to get Father's permission to join the Bureau of Fisheries," explained the boy, "and when Captain Murchison started on this trip, I begged him to let me come. The captain is an old friend of his."
"I'd rather you went in somebody else's boat than mine, then," was the ungracious response.
"Why, Hank!" exclaimed Colin in surprise, "what a thing to say!"
The old sailor nodded sagely.
"The skipper don't know much more about boat-whalin' than you do," he said, "that was all done away before his time. He's willin' to tackle anythin' that comes along, all right, but a whalin' boat is just about the riskiest thing that floats on water."
"How's that, Hank?" asked the boy. "I always thought they were supposed to be so seaworthy."
"They may be seaworthy," was the grim reply, "but I never yet saw a shipwright who'd guarantee to make a boat that'd be whaleworthy."
"But I'm sure I've read somewhere that whales never attacked boats," persisted Colin....