He slept
aboard in a bunk softer than many a sleeping place that had fallen to
his lot in France. And at sunrise the outgoing tide bore him swiftly
through the Narrows and spewed him out on the broad bosom of the Gulf of
Georgia, all ruffled by a stiff breeze that heeled the little yawl and
sent her scudding like a gray gull when Thompson laid her west, a half
north, to clear Roger Curtis Point.
He blew through Welcome Pass at noon on the forefront of a rising gale,
with the sun peeping furtively through cracks in a gathering cloudbank.
As the wind freshened, the manes of the white horses curled higher and
whiter. Thompson tied in his last reef in the lee of a point midway of
the Pass. Once clear of it the marching surges lifted the yawl and bore
her racing forward, and when the crest passed she would drop into a
green hollow like a bird to its nest, to lift and race and sink deep in
the trough again.
But she made merry weather of it. And Thompson rode the tiller, an eye
to his sheets, glorying in his mastery of the sea. It was good to be
there with a clean wind whistling through taut stays, no sound but the
ripple of water streaming under his lee, and the swoosh of breaking seas
that had no power to harm him.
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