“Killed, sir.”
“Jack Jewel?”
“Killed, sir.”
“Joe Hardy?”
“Killed, sir.”
And opposite all these poor fellows’ names, down would go on the quarter-bills the bloody marks of red ink—a murderer’s fluid, fitly used on these occasions.
CHAPTER XVII.
AWAY! SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH CUTTERS, AWAY!
It was the morning succeeding one of these general quarters that we picked up a life-buoy, descried floating by.
It was a circular mass of cork, about eight inches thick and four feet in diameter, covered with tarred canvas. All round its circumference there trailed a number of knotted ropes’-ends, terminating in fanciful Turks’ heads. These were the life-lines, for the drowning to clutch. Inserted into the middle of the cork was an upright, carved pole, somewhat shorter than a pike-staff. The whole buoy was embossed with barnacles, and its sides festooned with sea-weeds. Dolphins were sporting and flashing around it, and one white bird was hovering over the top of the pole. Long ago, this thing must have been thrown over-board to save some poor wretch, who must have been drowned; while even the life-buoy itself had drifted away out of sight.
The forecastle-men fished it up from the bows, and the seamen thronged round it.