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"Not in the slightest degree, my dear boy!" returned Captain Breaker with very decided emphasis. "You have served in your present capacity for four months; and if you were fifty years old, and had twenty years of naval experience behind you, it would be hardly possible for you to be more correct and dignified in the performance of the details of your office."
The saucy Arethusa was hard and fast on the rocks. "The word was given to lower the boats. I was one of the first cutter's crew. We had got her into the water, and the master, as good a seaman as ever stepped, came with us, and two young midshipmites. "`We'll not be made prisoners if we can help it, lads, said the master. `Here, lower down these two casks of bread, and this breaker of water.
I heard Gerda speak breathless words of thanks as I set her down, and then I looked round for Bertric. He was two waves behind us, as one may say, and I was just in time to see a breaker catch him up, smite his broad shoulders, and send him down on his face with whirling arms into its hollow, where the foam hid him as it curled over.
Yet there are men still living, and boys who have grown to manhood, scores of them, who toiled for years in the black dust breathed out from its throats of iron, and listened to the thunder of its grinding jaws from dawn to dark of many and many a day. These will surely tell you where the breaker stood. They are proud to have labored there in other years.
Aided by an awful breaker, whose tumultuous and raging advance was seen afar in the moonlight, this powerful jerk of the tightening hawser, which had got under the very keel of the lifeboat, lifted her up so high that she struck in her descent, with her ponderous iron keel or very undermost part of the lifeboat, the top rail of the Mandalay's bulwarks.
One Monday morning, however, he went back to his accustomed work at the breaker. He had thought that perhaps he might be ridiculed by the screen-room boys as one who had tried to soar above his fellows and had fallen ignominiously back to the earth. He expected to be greeted with jeering words and with cutting remarks, not so much in the way of malice as of fun.
Now one breaker, now another, burst down upon them, and carried some of the dark string away. Their ranks were quickly filled up, and on the string went. It seemed never-ending, as the blacks in the hold, scrambling up on deck, threw themselves overboard to join those who had already reached the shore.
Freeland was what may be called a well-bred southern gentleman, as different from Covey, as a well-trained and hardened Negro breaker is from the best specimen of the first families of the south. Though Freeland was a slaveholder, and shared many of the vices of his class, he seemed alive to the sentiment of honor. He had some sense of justice, and some feelings of humanity.
All day long they ran across the misty ocean, the little boat behaving splendidly, without sighting any living thing, till, at last, the night closed in again. There was, fortunately, a bag of biscuits in the boat, and a breaker of water; also there was, unfortunately, a breaker of rum, from which the two sailors, Bill and Johnnie, were already taking quite as much as was good for them.
An hour after tacking, an object was seen adrift on the ocean, and keeping away a little to close with it, it was ascertained to be a whale-boat, adrift. The boat was American built, had a breaker of water, the oars, and all the usual fittings in it; and the painter being loose, it had probably been lost, when towing in the night, in consequence of having been fastened by three half-hitches.
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