"And I'll promise you," he said, "that I'm always willing to make trouble for you, ashore or afloat, and wish I had a little more time for it now. And you can tell your skipper, if you like, in case he don't know it, that he got smashed with the same club that he used on Mr. Breen, and I'm only d——d sorry I didn't bring it down on his head. So long, you bloody-minded hell-drivers. See you again some day."
He descended, and Mr. Knapp gave the order to brace the yards.
"Give a good deal," he mused, as the men manned the braces, "to know just how they got news to that cruiser. Homeward bound from Hong-Kong—three months out. Couldn't ha' been sent after us."
But he never learned.
THE TRADE-WIND
The orgy was finished. The last sea-song had resounded over the smooth waters of the bay; the last drunken shout, oath, and challenge were voiced; the last fight ended in helplessness and maudlin amity, and the red-shirted men were sprawled around on the moonlit deck, snoring. Though the barrel of rum broached on the main-hatch was but slightly lowered, their sleep was heavy; scurvy-tainted men at the end of a Cape Horn passage may not drink long or deeply. Some lay as they fell—face upward; others on their sides for a while, then to roll over on their backs and so remain until the sleep was done; for in no other position may the human body rest easy on a hard bed with no pillow. And as they slept through the tropic night the full moon in the east rose higher and higher, passed overhead and disappeared behind a thickening haze in the western sky; but before it had crossed the meridian its cold, chemical rays had worked disastrously on the eyes of the sleeping men.
Captain Swarth, prone upon the poop-deck, was the first to waken. There was pain in his head, pain in his eyes,—which were swollen,—and a whistling tumult of sound in his ears coming from the Plutonian darkness surrounding him, while a jarring vibration of the deck beneath him apprised his awakening brain that the anchor was dragging. As he staggered to his feet a violent pressure of wind hurled him against the wheel, to which he clung, staring into the blackness to windward.
"All hands, there!" he roared! "Up with you all! Go forward and pay out on the chain!"
Shouts, oaths, and growls answered him, and he heard the nasal voice of his mate repeating his order. "Angel," he called, "get the other anchor over and give her all of both chains."