In Which is Shipwreck of Other Sort

Needs must, therefore, use every cool skilled resource that lay at
hand. No time now for broken hearts to ask attention, the ship must be
sailed. Crippled or not, what she had of help for us must be got out
of her, used, fostered, nourished. All the art of the navigator must
be charged with this duty. We must win through. And, as many a man who
has seen danger will testify, the great need brought to us all a great
calm and a steady precision in that which needed doing.

I saw Peterson at the wheel, wet to the skin, as now and again a
seventh wave, slow, portentous, deadly-deliberate, showed ahead of us,
advanced, reared and pounded down on us with its tons of might. But he
only shook the brine from his eyes and held her up, waiting for the
slow pulse of our crippled engine to come on.

"Can't keep my pipe lit!" he called to me, as I stood beside him; and
at last, Peterson, in a real time of danger, seemed altogether happy
and altogether free of apprehension beyond that regarding his pipe.

At the first breaking of the storm I had, of course, ordered all ports
closed, and had sent both my young companions to the ladies' cabin
aft, as the driest part of the boat. Even there, the water that
sometimes fell upon our decks as the great waves broke, poured aft and
even broke about the cabin, drenching everything above deck. It was
man's work that was to be done now, yet none could bear a hand in it
save the engineer and the steersman. I was, therefore, ready sternly
to reprove Jean Lafitte when, presently, I saw him making the perilous
passage forward, clinging to the rail and wet to the skin before he
could reach the forward deck. But he protested so earnestly and seemed
withal so fit and keen, that I relented and allowed him to take his
place by us at the wheel, showing him as well as I could, on the
chart, the course we were trying to hold--the mouth of a long channel,
six miles or more, dredged by the government across a foot of the bay
and making through to deeper and more sheltered waters beyond.