[CHAPTER X]
PHIL DISCOVERS WHAT HE IS
“Well, this is a queer go!” thought Phil, as he extricated the heavy pea-jacket from his “sea-trunk,” and put it on. “I never heard of a green hand before the mast being fed and lodged in the cabin. I must find Serge, and ask him about it.”
The night seemed intensely dark as he gained the deck, and for a few minutes he stood still to accustom his senses to it. He had found the slide drawn over the companion-way, and, as on emerging he shoved it back, he was gruffly requested by the helmsman to “shut it, quick!” Phil was enough of a sailor to know that this was so the glare of the cabin lamp might not blind the man and render it impossible for him to steer. So he immediately pulled the slide to, and then stood leaning against it.
He could feel the chill dampness of the mist on his cheek, and could see it driving by in the red and green blurs from the side-lights in the forward rigging. From the binnacle near at hand also came a faint glow of reflected light that vaguely outlined the man at the wheel. All else was a gray blackness, upon which the lofty masts and flattened sails were traced in deeper shadows, like Indian-ink against crayon. Two or three glowing sparks from lighted pipes showed where the watch on deck were gathered in the lee of the weather bulwarks. Phil started towards these, but ere he had taken half a dozen steps he ran plump into the mate, who was standing facing him on the weather side of the deck.
“Hello, young feller!” cried that worthy, as soon as he recovered the breath of which Phil’s sudden onset had deprived him; “ye seem to be blundering ahead like a June-bug in an electric flare. Aren’t ye afraid ye’ll walk overboard next, and step on the tail of a merrymaid?”
“No, sir,” laughed the lad; “and I’m awfully sorry I ran into you. But I didn’t see you, indeed I didn’t.”
“No wonder,” replied the mate, good-naturedly, “for I’m too thin to make a respecterble shadder, much less to cast one. Ef it had been the cap’n now, ye couldn’t have missed seeing him any more than ye could the broadside of a ship. By-the-way, had the old man turned out when ye left?”
“No, sir. I didn’t see him.”
“Waal, ye’d not only seen him, but heerd him fast enough ef he had. He gets so cramped up in that cubby-hole of his’n that when he comes out he has to roar to get his lungs in working order again. It’s a marciful dispensation of Proverdence I’m not a cap’n, for I never could abide to sleep in one of them chicken-coops.”