With her proud head toward the east, she went dashing on past the White Horse Rocks, and woe to the small angry waves which did not get out of her way, for she smashed them contemptuously in foaming masses from her majestic bows, sending them back in sparkling spray and bubbles to hiss their angry way to leeward in her wake. On she went, far off to sea, where the trade wind was strongest, disdaining gentle zephyrs near the land, with her great square yards swinging round at every watch while beating to windward––the tacks close down, yards as fine as they would lay, and the heavy sheets flat aft.
Every evening the surgeon, the purser, the chaplain, the major, and the old sailing-master were in the cabin, going over the chase of a certain pirate in a schooner “Centipede” away down on the Darien Coast, with Cape Garotte there under their lee, and the vultures and the sharks grinding the bones and tearing the flesh of the half of a man with the tusk gleaming out of his wiry mustache; and the padre, with his eyes staring wide open, and the crucifix, borne away by the carnivorous birds of prey.
All of those dreadful particulars, together with matters that had gone before––of a lost boy, a heart-broken mother, and a murdered mate, Mr. Binks, on board the brig “Martha Blunt”––the party at Escondido, the snuff-box, and Paul Darcantel––all about him, too, from the tragedy on the plantation, his despair, and reckless life afterward, when he served in slavers, where he did something to allay the sufferings of the poor wretches; and afterward how he was trepanned to the “Doçe Léguas,” went a cruise with Mr. Bill Gibbs, whose leg he hacked off with a hand-saw, not knowing at the time about the locket; the little child he had saved; how that child had saved him from his torture on the trestle with his mouselike teeth; how he had wandered the wide world over searching and searching for the mother of that boy!
And there the boy was––the manly, brave young fellow now––whom officers and sailors had always loved, flying away with the dark doctor––no longer Darcantel, but Harry Piron––with his fond father and mother in the distance, and the sweet girl he adored with her blonde head resting in her mother’s lap.
THE OLD WATER-LOGGED LAUNCH.
Ay, every soul in the ship knew all about it, and talked of it, and drank to the happiness of the young couple––all save Dick Hardy, who moved energetically about the frigate’s decks, with his eyes every where, below and aloft, prompt, sharp, and quick, quite like Cleveland, there, beside him, when they were together in the old 283 “Scourge” during the hurricane, and chased, to her destruction, the “Centipede.”
“Sail ho!” sang out the man on the fore-top-sail yard.
“Where away?”