He delivered the figure-head to the mate and was absorbed for some time in watching the sailors manipulate the rigging and sails.
There had always been a fascination about shipping for Will Bertram, and he glanced at a boy about his own age who was greasing some ropes with positive envy.
“I’d like to take Tom Dalton’s place for a trip or two,” he thought, but he changed his mind a moment later, as Captain Morris came walking briskly from the shipping office toward the ship.
At the sight of him the ship’s boy, Tom Dalton, whose head had been bent over his work, uttered a howl of terror, and, springing to the rigging, ensconced himself twenty feet from the decks, where he sat pale and sniveling.
A gloom seemed to come over every man on deck as Captain Morris stepped aboard. He had a reputation for excessive rudeness and brutality, and his gleaming eyes and flushed face told that he was half intoxicated and ugly.
“Aha, you’ve run away, have you?” he yelled at the terrified Tom, shaking his fist at him; “well, so much the worse for you. I told you if you went ashore without my permission I’d treat you to the cat of nine tails, and I mean to keep my word. Come down, there!”
But the cabin boy only broke into wilder sobs and tears.
“Get the whip!” ordered Morris of the mate.
The latter went into the forecastle and returned with the dreaded instrument of torture with which the cruel captain occasionally terrorized the delinquent members of the ship’s crew.
Will Bertram shuddered as he took it from the mate’s hand and slashed it around a mast with a whistling, cutting sound, a look of fiendish satisfaction on his brutal face.