The crew took up the strain, and Dick and Anny stood together in a circle of singing men, each with his rumkin held high above his head and his foot keeping time to the rhythm.
Old Pet spat on the deck and an envious light came into her evil old face. All her life she had longed to be the centre of a scene like this, the magnet of an admiring crowd of hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-loving men. All her youth had been spent in dreams of a night like this. Now in her age it was bitter to see it come to another woman.
As for Anny, she was intoxicated with it all; any sense of prudence had left her. She was supremely happy. Now and again a faint regret that she could not marry Hal rose in her mind, but she dismissed it promptly.
The future had no being for her, and the past was a dream; the thing that counted was the present, the laughing, pulsing, living present.
And as the Anny’s crew roared out their captain’s own love-song, and Dick, his Spanish blood on fire with love triumphant, kissed her hair, her eyes, and mouth, she laughed as freely and as joyously as he had done.
The shadows were deepening by this time and the deep blue sky was studded with stars, and Anny, looking up from the Captain’s shoulder, said suddenly:
“It is late, sir; I must go back to the Ship now.”
Dick looked at her in astonishment for a moment, and a contemptuous cackling laugh broke from between Pet Salt’s thin, blackened lips.
At the sound of it Anny shuddered involuntarily and drew a little closer to the Spaniard, who, noting her agitation, turned on the old woman angrily, his eyes suddenly losing their dreamy love-heaviness, and becoming hard and bright.
“Peace, hag!” he rapped out, “get thee down thy rat-hole, and take thy sodden man with thee, or nothing shall you see of me or my cargoes from this night on.”