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It must be a hard fortune, indeed, that will not throw us in the way of some fisherman, or coaster, who will be willing to let us have a bend or two, for double wages." "Why, on that p'int, Miles, the difficulty is in the war, and the hot press that must now be going.
At this moment, she would have gladly recalled the young commander of the Coquette, to apprize him of the enemy that was nigh; and then, ashamed of terrors that she was fain to hope savored more of woman's weakness than of truth, she endeavored to believe the whole some ordinary movement of a coaster, who, familiar with his situation, could rot possibly be either in want of aid, or an object of alarm.
At eight years of age he was placed, as cabin-boy, on board a coaster; and from that time down to the moment when he witnessed the marriage ceremony between Mark and Bridget, he had been a sailor. Throughout the whole war of the revolution Bob had served in the navy, in some vessel or other, and with great good luck, never having been made a prisoner of war.
The strait once cleared, a large bay opened before her, in which the sea was more calm, and rippled gently up against a beach of sand and pebble. The coaster at length succeeded in gaining this bay; and then by a manoeuvre directed by the officer of the watch she hove-to with a celerity that denoted a numerous crew.
"There must, as you suggest, be some purpose in it. God writes straight on crooked lines, Captain." Thus Dormer Colville found two points of sympathy with this skipper of a slow coaster, who had never made a mistake at sea nor done an injustice to any one serving under him: a simple faith in the Almighty Purpose and a very honest respect for money.
By the time the "Bahama" arrived, the plans were all made. As the steamer came up to the dock, a small schooner slipped alongside, and eight or ten heavy cases were transferred from the larger vessel's hold to the deck of the coaster. Then the little vessel sailed over to Green Cay, a desert island about sixty miles from Nassau, where she was soon joined by the "Oreto."
There stood on a side-table, in its silver coaster, a long-necked Rhenish bottle, and beside it a thin pink glass, and he quivered his fingers in a peevish way toward them. But unless he found himself better very soon, he would take his case into his own hands, and try the dietary to which nature pointed.
The surf and the fever are the Minotaurs of the West Coast, and in the year there is not a day passes that they do not claim and receive their tribute in merchandise and human life. Said an old Coaster to me, pointing at the harbor of Grand Bassam: "I've seen just as much cargo lost overboard in that surf as I've seen shipped to Europe." One constantly wonders how the Coasters find it good enough.
Sometimes it was a frightened trader, which had come tearing in with her canvas curved like a lady's bodice, because she had seen a patched foretopsail rising slowly above the violet water-line. Sometimes it was from a coaster, which had found a waterless Bahama cay littered with sun-dried bodies. Once there came a man who had been mate of a Guineaman, and who had escaped from the pirate's hands.
But suffice it to say, that soon, preceded by my companion, I found myself a mountin' the nearly precipitus stairs, that led to the Roller Coaster. And havin' reached the spot, who should we find there but Ardelia Tutt and Bial Flamburg. They had been on the Roller Coaster seven times in succession, and the car.