41 Lure O Gold 1904

"
XII
THE "TAI-FUNG"
THE next morning
we were in the teeth of the
"
taifung."
The poor Modesto, with so much of her great
hulk exposed to the storm, staggered along over the
seas like a drunken man. She heeled over from side
to side,
drove her nose into the watery hills that piled
up before her, and, with her stern well out of the sea,
she strained heavily, while her screw raced like a wind
mill until she settled down again.
The racing and grinding of the propeller made the
Doctor very nervous at breakfast.
the sound his eyebrows would knit darkly.
Each time he heard
"
I don t like this at all," he said once, when the shaft
ground so harshly
like a wet dog.
that the Modesto shivered all over
I was in the old Rio when she bucked
a typhoon for six days off the coast of China, and was
blown seven hundred miles out of her course.
Some
times I thought she would rack her engines all to pieces.
But the Modesto is a clever ship. She ll
get through
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