Free Jonah Watch by Jack; Cady Page A

towing watch, steaming watch ... the line broke a couple of the bosun's ribs."
    "Lucky. He was lucky."
    "He sure was." Howard, in spite of the warm galley, shivered.
    "I been to the fantail," Lamp admitted, "to look at the new line. I got this queasy feeling, like."
    One by one the men drifted aft to look at the new line.
    "I forgot the date," Lamp said, less portentously than Howard expected. "It's gone and turned to September."
    "Just keep something in the pot," Howard said. "Those guys are going to wake up starving."
    The secular world of a ship rarely extends beyond its own gangway, and only under intimate conditions.
    Brace, like a cloud-walker on the mast, looked down at the curious sight of Adrian 's crew boarding Abner . Abner 's crew disappeared to gamey-smelling and finally immobile bunks where they lay like a small company of mostly clothed corpses, drawn faces gradually relaxing beneath the red nightlights that were turned on in the waning afternoon. Howard, checking the crew list, stood silent, counting, hugely moved by a small intimation of fear.
    On Adrian , the bosun Conally stood at the foot of the mast and yelled, "Secure the job."
    Had they been offered, Abner 's captain would not have accepted watchstanders from the Base, which was too remote, too uncertain. He would have asked his crew to muddle through. Levere, given the same circumstance, would have refused as well.
    "Move quiet," Dane hissed above Abner 's fantail. "Flake the line on the pier. They'll want to repair it themselves."
    Brace, knowing the spectacular solitude of the mast, and having had time to consider the largest implications of Snow's backhanding, stepped to earth with new convictions.
    "I should be over there helping."
    "We're splitting crew," Conally said. "Double watches. You take the four-to-mid."
    "What can I do now?"
    "Pretend we're steaming," Conally told him. "Sack out until your watch. Let your hair grow.''
    Once again, the gray chill moved down the pier, insinuating between the ships, concentrating at the end of the pier where Hester C . rode on its mooring, unclaimed, certainly unloved, and absolutely feared. By the time Brace relieved the watch at 1600 , the local newspaper was on the streets carrying an ignorant, journalistic account, together with a ten-year-old photograph of Abner 's captain taken when he was exec on the snatcher Bluebell . Various deities, all of whom could be accused of inventing the sea, and of instigating the notion of things that float, were flagrantly thanked in Portland's missions and churches.
    Brace relieved the watch, checked the phone, entered weather observations in the log, turned up the radio, looked to the mooring, and made himself acquainted with the current traffic in Portland harbor. As the dusk gathered, he surveyed the lights of Portland where, it might be, lonely young women of worth waited with hope for the friendship of some man who did not wear a white hat. As dusk accumulated, and the tide fell, Hester C . dropped below the end of the pier until only the mast was visible.
    With Dane and Snow aboard Abner , Conally found himself serving as OD, and it was Conally, shaken from sleep sometime after 2300, who looked into the pale, terrified features of Brace, who, although not yet drooling, was idiot-eyed. Conally was on his feet and starting to dress before Brace could speak.
    "It's adrift."
    "What?"
    "That lobster boat is adrift."
    Conally relaxed. "Things drift," he said, preparing himself almost optimistically for an eventual return to sleep. "We'll call the Base. Let them pick it off with a small boat."
    "Things don't drift against the tide," Brace chattered.
    Hester C ., like a small blot of self-destruction, faced the tide in a drift toward the mudflats.
    Conally, shaken to the denied roots of his Indian-raised soul, swore later that his hair stood straight. He raced to the bridge, called the Base, watched a picket boat pick up the tow and return it to the pier. Conally checked