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The Jasper B. had been abandoned for so long, and was so completely abandoned except for the visits of Cap'n Abernethy, who fished from it now and then, that Loge had conceived the idea of making it the back-door, so to speak, of Morris's. In the event of a raid upon Morris's his "get-away" through the hulk was provided for.
A score of men scrambled from the trucks and began to haul out of them all the essentials of a shipyard. Wheel, rudder, masts, spars, bowsprit, quantities of rope and cable followed in fact, every conceivable thing necessary to convert the Jasper B. from a hulk into a properly rigged schooner. Cleggett, with a pith and brevity characteristic of the man, had given his order in one sentence.
It was fortunate he had not done so, he reflected, since the hulk was now required for very different purposes. Jimson, a man of inconspicuous costume, but insinuating manners, had little difficulty in finding the hireling who had charge of the houseboat, and still less in persuading him to resign his care.
The major set him up as a young ranchman in a lovely valley in the Big Horn Range, and there he went sturdily to work, but before the winter was fairly on the country was rousing to the appeals of Cuba, and before it was gone the Maine had sunk, a riddled hulk, and the spring came in with a call to arms.
While he lived it was not in her power to control the unreasoning resistless thing that stands for love in woman: he WAS her love, the master of her impulses. Dead, he was an unwholesome, unlovely clod, a pallid thing to be scorned, a hulk of worthless clay. His blood was cold.
Devlin's office. Ill luck for Viking in the hour of her success. Phil's shattered hulk is drifting. The masts have gone by the board, the pilot from the captain's side. Only the man's "unconquerable soul" is on the bridge, watching the craft dip at the bow till the waters, their sport out, should hugely swallow it. We were all gathered round.
I felt something slip from my hip pocket, but the weird creaking of the ladder, the groans of the laboring hulk, and the lapping of the waves about the staging drowned the sound of the splash as my revolver dropped into the river. Rather white-faced, I think, I joined Smith on the deck. He had witnessed my accident, but "We must risk it," he whispered in my ear. "We dare not turn back now."
Here am I, Willum Stout yours to command, a trifle stouter, it may be, and hairier than I once was, not to say older, but by a long chalk better able to love the old girl who took me in, an' befriended me when I was a reg'lar castaway, with dirty weather brewin', an' the rocks o' destitootion close under my lee; and who'll never forget your kindness, no never, so long as two timbers of the old hulk hold together.
The hulk, once gaudy with paint and gilding, has come under the skill of the lapidary and sea-artist. It is crusted with emerald and flossy mosses, and glimmers with diamond, jacinth, ruby, topaz, sapphire and gold.
"When to-morrow I tell you what I have, hour after hour, with brief rests, drawn from that poor old battered hulk" he pointed toward Peters' cot "and when you consider what he is then say if he is the man, or his sailor friends are the men, to invent such a story.
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