“You’re a blamed brute, bos’n,” said the first speaker, “an’ if I wa’n’t mighty well used up I’d soak you a good whanging for that. Yer know the poor boy’s sick wid scurvy, an’ aint likely to pull through.”
“I’ll ware ye out when th’ watch is called, yer preacher,” said the bos’n confidently. “Talk away, for you’ll only get it all the worse when I shucks my dunnage.” Then, as if the matter were settled, he snugged up in his soaking bunk and hove down to warm a piece of his steaming covering until it should cease to send a chill through his big frame and he could wander into dreamland.
The shivering form of the boy in the corner moved again, and he groaned in agony. It was useless for him to try to sleep with his limbs swollen and his flesh almost bursting with the loathsome disease. The pile of wet clothes upon him could not keep him warm, and each shiver sent agony through him. He would die unless he could get relief soon, and there the ship was off the Horn in June, the beginning of winter, without one chance in fifty of making port in less than two months.
In his half-delirious state he lived many of his early schooldays again, and then followed thoughts of those who were nearest to him. He must die. His grave must be in that great, dark void beneath. Oh, the loneliness of that great ocean! What would it be like far below in the blackness of the vast deep, beyond the heave of the great sea, in the very bosom of the great world of silence? The horror of it caused him to groan. Would anyone punish the cruel ship-owners and captain who had so foully murdered him with the cheap and filthy food? What would anyone care after he had gone? What would he care, away down in that everlasting blackness, where no one would ever see him again? He lay upon his back and stared with red and swollen eyes at the bunk above him where Tom, the quartermaster, snored loud enough to be heard above the dull, thunderous roar overhead. In another hour the watch must turn out, but they would let him lie by; him, a dying ship’s-boy. But would he die outright? Would his soul live down there in that awful blackness, where they must soon heave his body? He had heard of sailors’ spirits haunting ships. Could his do so? Was there a hideous devil below waiting for him? He had heard there was. Far down in the bottomless abyss some monster might await him. He gazed with staring eyes at the dim lamp, and longed for a little light and sunshine to relieve the terrible gloom of the Antarctic winter day.
Then there broke upon his ears a wild, sonorous, deep-drawn cry sounding over the storm-swept sea. It was not human. What was it? Was it for him? The thought made him sick with terror. He groaned aloud, and Tom turned over in his wet clothes until the sudden chill of moving from the one steaming place made him grumble audibly.
“What was it, Tom?” he whispered.
“What?” growled the sailor surlily.
“There——” and the cry was repeated.
Tom growled a little and then rolled snug again. Suddenly he started up. “A man might as well freeze to death on deck as in this unholy frozen hole,” he said. Then he climbed stiffly down from his bunk, clapped his sou’wester on his head, and, tying the flaps snug under his chin, he slid back the forecastle door with a bang, and landed on the main deck.
There he stood a minute watching the great fabric straining under her lower maintopsail, hove to in that sea that the Cape Horner knows so well and dreads so much. In the waist, the foam on deck told of a flood of icy water that poured again and again over the topgallant rail and crashed like a Niagara upon the deck planks, rushing to leeward through the ports in the bulwarks and carrying everything movable along with it.