"Are the two drunks awake yet?" asked the latter.
"Not at four o'clock, sir," answered the mate. "Mr. Hansen couldn't get 'em out. I'll soon turn 'em to."
As he spoke, two men appeared from around the corner of the forward house, and came aft. They were young men, between twenty-five and thirty, with intelligent, sun-burnt faces. One was slight of figure, with the refinement of thought and study in his features; the other, heavier of mold and muscular, though equally quick in his movements, had that in his dark eyes which said plainly that he was wont to supplement the work of his hands with the work of his brain. Both were dressed in the tar-stained and grimy rags of the merchant sailor at sea; and they walked the wet and unsteady deck with no absence of "sea-legs," climbed the poop steps to leeward, as was proper, and approached the captain and first mate at the weather rail. The heavier man touched his cap, but the other merely inclined his head, and smiling frankly and fearlessly from one face to the other, said, in a pleasant, evenly modulated voice:
"Good morning. I presume that one of you is the captain."
"I'm the captain. What do you want?" was the gruff response.
"Captain, I believe that the etiquette of the merchant service requires that when a man is shanghaied on board an outward-bound ship he remains silent, does what is told him cheerfully, and submits to fate until the passage ends; but we cannot bring ourselves to do so. We were struck down in a dark spot last night,—sandbagged, I should say,—and we do not know what happened afterward, though we must have been kept unconscious with chloroform or some such drug. We wakened this morning in your forecastle, dressed in these clothes, and robbed of everything we had with us."
"Where were you slugged?"
"In Cherry Street. The bridge cars were not running, so we crossed from Brooklyn by the Catherine Ferry, and foolishly took a short cut to the elevated station."
"Well, what of it?"
"What—why—why, captain, that you will kindly put us aboard the first inbound craft we meet."