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I, after this, finding meselfe somewhat altered, and my body more like a devil then anything else, after being so smeared and burst with their filthy meate that I could not digest, but must suffer all patiently. Finally they seemed to me kinder and kinder, giving me of the best bitts where lesse wormes weare.
Haven in the third cutter, with a volunteer crew, left the ship to procure a tug-steamer. Peaks, Bitts, Leach, and the head steward had been privately requested to be on deck, in case any unexpected demonstration was made by the mutineers. In the steerage everything was very quiet. The sensation below was decidedly superior to that on deck.
His arms, great bunches of muscles, strained and fairly cracked with the strain. The wire rope seemed to give. Then, as the ship rolled the other way, the strain eased. Koku, aided by the cable, and by the leverage given by the several turns about the bitts, had held the big gun. "Quick!" cried Tom. "Now another rope so it can't roll the opposite way, and we'll have her."
It enabled me to watch the course of events more safely, less exposed to the danger of recognition. I stood for a moment at the foot of the companion accustoming my eyes to the gloom. After a moment, with a shock of surprise, I made out a shining pair of bead-points gazing at me unblinkingly from the shadow under the bitts. Slowly the man defined himself, as a shape takes form in a fog.
He tossed the thing upon the floor, and leaned back in the wheelbarrow, inert. "Yay, Penrod!" Sam Williams appeared in the doorway, and, behind Sam, Master Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior. "Yay, there!" Penrod made no response. The two came in, and Sam picked up the poor contrivance Penrod had tossed upon the floor. "What's this ole dingus?" Sam asked. "Nothin'." "Well, what's it for?"
They were trying to batter down the door leading into the steerage, but as yet with no success. "All ready!" shouted Perth. Phillips, who was the only one of the crew remaining on board, hastily belayed the clewline at the fife-rail, hauling it just taut enough to hold Bitts, without choking him to death.
“By all means let us make the attempt,” the captain said. “Thank God, there is a hope of escape for us all!” The men sprang to their feet with alacrity when they heard the news. Another hawser was brought up and firmly spliced to the one in use just beyond the bulwark forward. Then it was led along outside the shrouds and fastened to the bitts astern and then to the mizzen-mast.
Bringing to light some spare coils of rope from the lockers, he put a clove-hitch on the standing part of the sea-anchor hawser, and carried the new running-line aft, making it fast to the stern bitts. Then he cast off from the forward bitts. The Dazzler swung off into the trough, completed the evolution, and pointed her nose toward shore.
Then, indeed, the thin but tough hawser straightened out taut as a bow-string between the two vessels as the baronet sent his engines powerfully ahead; the barque's windlass bitts creaked and groaned with the tremendous strain to which they were suddenly subjected; a foaming surge gathered and hissed under her bows, and as her harassed crew, active as wild-cats, skipped about the decks busily letting go and clewing up, away went the two craft toward the closing gap.
Bradford, Carlin, Welton and Miss Proctor, however, had established themselves in the extreme bow. Miss Proctor perched on the bitts, while the men stood or leaned near at hand. Occasionally, as the tug changed course, Miss Proctor would utter a little exclamation and thrust her arms out aimlessly, as though uncertain. All three of the men thereupon assured her balance for her.
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