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This was an indulgence denied the young gentlemen, of whom one was on the forecastle, leaning against the mast, dreaming of home, one in the waist, supporting the nettings, and one walking the lee-side of the quarter-deck, his eyes shut, his thoughts confused, and his footing uncertain.
I watched my opportunity as she pulled up alongside, and called out, leaning well over the nettings, "Get back to your ship! treachery! get back to your ship!" The little French serpent was at my side with the speed of thought, his long clear knife glancing in one hand, while the fingers of the other were laid on his lips.
It began to rain, but Richling sought no shelter. The men he was in search of were not to be found. But the victorious ships, with bare black arms stretched wide, boarding nettings up, and the dark muzzles of their guns bristling from their sides, came, silently as a nightmare, slowly around the bend at Slaughterhouse Point and moved up the middle of the harbor.
"By the powers, it bates Bannagher," cried Mick, who was watching the fight alongside of me on the upper deck, springing up on to the hammock nettings in his excitement to see the finish, unthinking of the breach of discipline he was committing. "Go it, ye cripples. Sure, Tom, the little wun'll win what d'ye call him?" "He's a thrasher," I replied, jumping up, too, on the top of the nettings.
We got the new one out into the nettings; seized on the tack, sheets, and halyards, and the hanks; manned the halyards, cut adrift the frapping-lines, and hoisted away; but before it was half-way up the stay it was blown all to pieces. When we belayed the halyards, there was nothing left but the bolt-rope.
There was nothing moving about the decks. The lookouts, aft, and at the gangways, sat or stood like statues half bronze, half alabaster. The old quartermaster, who was cunning the ship, and had perched himself on a carronade, with his arm leaning on the weather nettings, was equally motionless.
They slid noiselessly along like phantoms of the deep, every thing in the air and in the water was so still I crossed to the lee side of the deck to look at them The Wave, seeing some one on the hammock nettings, sheered close to, under the Firebrand's lee quarter, and some one asked, "Do you want to speak us?"
Archie stood his watch without seeing or hearing any thing of the rebels, and when he was relieved, at four o'clock, he aroused Simpson, Woods, and his cousin, and after they had tied up their hammocks, and stowed them away in the nettings, Woods went to the sergeant's room to obtain his consent to their proposed excursion.
Some prisoner appeared to be crouching low in the vehicle, but, leaving him to take care of himself, Hewitt hurried into the station and shook Nettings by the hand. "Well," he said, "have you got the murderer of Rameau yet?" "No," Nettings growled. "Unless well, Goujon's under remand still, and, after all, I've been thinking that he may know something " "Pooh, nonsense!" Hewitt answered.
Now the water became smoother over a wider surface, now black rocks rose sheer out of the sea as high as the hammock nettings, and then once more there was a bubbling, and hissing, and frothing, betokening concealed dangers, which none but the most experienced of pilots could hope to avoid. Meantime, many an eye was turned towards the French squadron.
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