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"A moment ago you were drawing like a square-rigger before a quartering gale, and now you're shaking in the wind yes, and likely to be aback, if you don't watch out." The teeth locked in the bosun's head so hard a jolt for so smoothly delivered a blow! He gazed amazed. Again a deceptive swing or two, a fiddling with one hand and the other, a moment of rapid foot-work, a quick side-step, and biff!
Then the captain will turn to 'Scully' and say, 'Pipe down, whereupon 'Scully' and the other bosun's mates will blow a trill on their pipes, and all hands will go about their business." So concluded our oracle. "Gee whiz!" said the "Kid." "I nearly got into trouble the other night, for I almost dozed when I was on the buoy.
Yet it seemed to offer the only imaginable solution of the problem; for presently, as we continued to roll and stagger down toward the doomed barque, Captain Dacre turned to me and said: "There is only one way to do this job, Mr Conyers; and that is for the Frenchmen to float the end of a heaving-line down to us, by which we may be able to send them a hawser with a bosun's chair and hauling lines attached.
"Bosun's mate!" he sang out when all were ready. "Pipe the hands to secure the guns for sea!"
Not Jasper Begg, as I bear witness. Now, I put myself at the head of our fellows and, the better to find the track, I went down on my hands and my knees like a four-footed thing, and signalling to those behind with a bosun's whistle, I led them well enough through the wood to the wicker-basket bridge; and would have gone on from there straight down to the house but for something which happened at the clearing of the thicket, just as I stood up to bid the men go over.
"Having taken the pirate captain prisoner, sailed slap over the schooner, whose decks were piled high with dead and whose lee scuppers ran blood, for the order had been 'Cutlasses, and die hard! 'Bosun's mate, take a bight of the flying-jib sheet, and start this villain if he doesn't confess his sins double quick, said the British captain.
Before I could recover breath to say a word, the bosun's chair was swiftly sliding along the hawser, on its way back to the barque; and presently, after some apparent delay and hesitation on the part of those aboard the doomed vessel, it swung off her taffrail, on its return journey, with a man seated in it.
The sailors saw me crying. If I had only had the wit to dodge the bosun's blows, the matter of the slush would have been turned off with a laugh, since he only struck me in the irritation of the moment. He would have enjoyed chasing me round the deck. If I had only come up merrily that is what would have happened.
How many collisions have occurred with these reefs, where the breaking surf is covered by the noise of the wind! How many vessels have rammed each other, despite their running lights, despite the warnings given by their bosun's pipes and alarm bells!
The bosun's breath was coming in labored gasps, yet still that terrible man kept holding him close, drawing his waist to him and increasing his pressure as he drew. "You've the tonnage and engine-room of a battleship," jeered Kieran, "but you've only the steam of an East River tug. And a low-pressure tug at that. And what little steam you had is gone. You've a big engine but no boiler.
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