'How big's a man's windpipe?' asked Gordon. The cook eyed him. 'Would about that lump,' said Gordon, snatching up a knife and slightly scoring a corner off one of the pieces, 'fit a man's windpipe?'
'Ah! would it?' muttered the cook. 'And if you'll let me guess whose pipe it is you're a-thinking of, I wouldn't mind telling you that I'm game—s'elp me God!—to ram it down with this—a clean job!'
And seizing a long, black, sharp-ended poker, he flourished it at Gordon's mouth, poising it as though he meant to do for the steward.
Gordon rounded out of the little caboose with a laugh.
Mr. Tweed walked the weather side of the quarter-deck; his sextant lay upon the skylight cover. The seaman named Legg was at the helm. His figure, airily clad in duck and calico and wide straw hat, stood out like a painted figure of marble, as it slightly rose and slightly fell against the hot pale-blue sky in the north.
Miss Vanderholt was seated in a deck-chair under the awning, beside a quarter-boat. A book lay upon her lap, but her hands were clasped upon it, and her eyes were bent upon the sea. She viewed it listlessly. The monotony of that eternal girdle was growing shocking. It seemed to bind up her very soul. She thought to herself: 'They speak of the freedom of the sea. But doesn't its sense of freedom come only when motion is swift, when the roar of the white water is strong, and when one's home is not very far off?'
It was the men's dinner-hour. Miss Violet had often, during the warm weather, from her comfortable quarter-deck chair, observed a couple of men a little before noon stagger with sweating faces out of the galley, bearing in their hands a sort of wooden washing-tub, which sent up a great deal of steam. This she knew was the crew's dinner.
She had sometimes wondered how they ate: whether they spread a table-cloth; whether they planted a cruet-stand in their midst, and placed knives and forks on either hand, for the hearts to cut and come again. Who carved? She supposed that the boatswain took the head of the table.
She had never felt so curious, however, in this matter as to ask questions, and as, moreover, she had not caught so much as a glimpse of the interior of the crew's dwelling-house, she had figured into conviction a comfortable little sea-parlour in which the men dined just as she and Glew and the mate and her father dined.