PART I
CHAPTER I
"THE YANKEE HELL-SHIP"
Bucking Broncho awoke to the familiar cry of "Roll out, roll out, show a leg!" and thinking it was the call of the Round Up Boss in the early morning, he opened his eyes and sat up.
The sight that met his gaze considerably astonished him, and the foc's'le, with its double row of bunks, its stuffy atmosphere, and its swinging oil-lamp, he mistook for some mining-camp shanty.
Slowly his half-shut eyes took in the details of the gloomy den, into which the grey light of dawn had as yet hardly penetrated.
Round him lay men in every condition of drunkenness, some prone upon the deck, others hanging half in and half out of their bunks, all apparently still in the stupors of a late carouse.
Stretched upon a chest right under his bunk lay a ghastly object clothed in greasy, blood-stained rags, which but for its hoarse rattling breathing he would have taken for a corpse.
From the bunk above him came a spasmodic grunt at intervals, sudden and unexpected, whilst opposite him a cadaverous-looking deadbeat in a miner's shirt whistled discordantly through a hawk-like, fiery-tinted nose.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light he discovered other forms scattered in a variety of grotesque attitudes amongst the litter of chests and sea-bags on the deck, and through the open door he beheld a man, in a pair of overalls, sluicing himself with a bucket of water.