"I think he's a brute," said Appleby quietly.
They said nothing further, for that was their first acquaintance with the under-side of life at sea, and their thoughts were busy, while in another minute the mate looking in their direction signed to them, and it did not appear advisable to keep a man of his kind waiting.
"Give these beasts a hand," he said when they stood among the seamen on the sloppy forecastle. "You can't be more useless than they are, anyway."
Niven stooped, and clawed disgustedly at the great wet hawser behind the swaying men, and one of them, who was dark-haired and sallow, glanced over his shoulder when the mate swung away.
"Ah, cochon!" he said.
Another, who had tow-hair, stood up and stretched his stalwart limbs. "Der peeg! Oh, yes. Dot vas goot," he said. "I tink der vas some troubles mit dot man soon."
A little man with high cheek bones and curious half-closed eyes loosed his grasp upon the rope and laughed softly. He also said something to himself, but as it was Finnish neither Appleby nor Niven were much the wiser.
It, however, occurred to them that the language they had listened to was not quite what one would have expected to hear on board an English ship. There were a few Englishmen on board her, but they did not talk, and for the most part leaned up against anything handy, or slouched aimlessly about looking very unfit for work, which was not altogether astonishing considering the fashion in which they had spent the previous night.
Still the hawser was paid out at last, and Appleby stood up breathless, smeared with slime and coal-dust when the ropes astern fell with a splash, and there was a hoot from the bustling little tug. Somebody roared out orders on the quay above, paddles splashed, and the lad felt his heart give a curious little throb as the Aldebaran slowly commenced to move. She was a big iron barque loaded until her scuppers amidships were apparently only a foot or two from the scum of the dock.
He stood forward behind the maze of wire rope about the jibboom, which was not yet run out, on the forecastle, but just below him this broke off, and the deck ran aft sunk almost a man's height between the iron bulwarks to the raised poop at the opposite end of the ship. Half-way between stood a little iron house, and down the middle of the deck rose the three great masts, the last and smallest of them, springing from the poop. Behind it a man in shining oilskins was spinning the wheel. The deck looked very long and filthy, for the wheat-dust and the coal-dust were over everything, and bales, and boxes, and cases strewn amidst the straggling lengths of rope.