And down the deck, slanted for the moment to forty- five degrees, Jerry slipped and slid, vainly clawing at the smooth surface for a hold.

He fetched up against the foot of the mizzenmast, while Captain Van Horn, with the sailor's eye for the coral patch under his bow, gave the order "Hard a-lee!" Borckman and the black steersman echoed his words, and, as the wheel spun down, the _Arangi_, with the swiftness of a witch, rounded into the wind and attained a momentary even keel to the flapping of her headsails and a shifting of headsheets.
Jerry, still intent on Meringe, took advantage of the level footing to recover himself and scramble toward the rail.

But he was deflected by the crash of the mainsheet blocks on the stout deck-traveller, as the mainsail, emptied of the wind and feeling the wind on the other side, swung crazily across above him.

He cleared the danger of the mainsheet with a wild leap (although no less wild had been Van Horn's leap to rescue him), and found himself directly under the mainboom with the huge sail looming above him as if about to fall upon him and crush him.
It was Jerry's first experience with sails of any sort.

He did not know the beasts, much less the way of them, but, in his vivid recollection, when he had been a tiny puppy, burned the memory of the hawk, in the middle of the compound, that had dropped down upon him from out of the sky.