Again and again, as we
paced up and down this afternoon, when to me nothing unusually antic
seemed impending, he would seize my arm as I lost balance, and as the
Elsinore smashed down on her side and heeled over and over with a
colossal roll that seemed never to end, and that always ended with an
abrupt, snap-of-the-whip effect as she began the corresponding roll
to windward. In vain I strove to learn how Mr. Pike forecasts these
antics, and I am driven to believe that he does not consciously
forecast them at all. He FEELS them; he knows them. They, and the
sea, are ingrained in him.
Toward the end of our little promenade I was guilty of impatiently
shaking off a sudden seizure of my arm in his big paw. If ever, in
an hour, the Elsinore had been less gymnastic than at that moment, I
had not noticed it. So I shook off the sustaining clutch, and the
next moment the Elsinore had smashed down and buried a couple of
hundred feet of her starboard rail beneath the sea, while I had shot
down the deck and smashed myself breathless against the wall of the
chart-house.
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