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Those whom our cutlasses had spared were marched out along their own plank, in the approved old fashion; and in time the scuppers relieved the decks of the blood that made traffic temporarily impossible. And all the time the British-man-of-war admired and applauded in the offing.
She was lying down to it like a racing yacht, with the foam seething and hissing and brimming to her rail at every lee roll, and the lee scuppers all afloat, while she swept along with the eager, headlong, impetuous speed of a sentient creature flying for its life.
"Eh!" said the skipper, deliberately removing his pipe from his mouth, and looking around him in the greatest apparent astonishment. Down rushed the squall, howling and whistling through the rigging, careening the brig until the water spouted up through her scuppers, and causing the gear aloft to crack and surge ominously. "Let fly the tops'l halliards, fore and main!" yelled the mate.
While the great guns were roaring, and the cannon-balls flying, Black Pedro stood amid the smoke, in his velvet suit, his black beard bristling with rage, and his face bearing an expression ten times more ferocious than his grand- father's at its worst. He noted carefully the precise moment when the scuppers were running with blood, and then gave the signal for boarding.
Billy, you open the self-baling scuppers in the cockpit, my lad, and Lathrop and Harry, you get out forward and double lash all that top hamper." "Why, Ben, what's the matter?" asked Frank, "the sea is just as smooth as it has been all day and the sun is shining." "Well, it won't be in a half an hour," replied the old salt, pointing southward. "See that cloud?"
They lay on the wet decks, in the scuppers, and along the transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship's bow be turned toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed into a state of self-pity and miserable oblivion to their environment, from which hunger nor nausea nor aching bones could shake them.
The ship is lying over half upon her beam-ends; lee scuppers under water, and forecastle all in a smother of foam. Rigging all let go, and washing about decks; topsail yards down upon the caps, and sails flapping and beating against the masts; and starboard watch hauling out the reef-tackles of the main topsail.
I had jumped from the nettings, where I was perched, to assist in unbolting one of the carronade slides, when I slipped and capsized against a peg sticking out of one of the scuppers. I took it for something else, and d d the ring bolt incontinently. Caboose, the cook, was passing with his mate, a Jamaica negro of the name of John Crow, at the time.
He walked to the window, as if he didn't want her to see what he thought of that, and I saw him looking hard at something outside in the snow. When he walked back to the fire he was smiling, and he stooped over and poked Arabella with his finger. "So that was it!" he said. "Full to the scuppers, poor little wretch! Minnie, I am hoist with my own petard, which in this case was a boomerang."
He however let go the rope, and suddenly making a pass at the hat with his staff, lost his balance and was plunged headlong into the larboard scuppers, and with such force that had not his bones been equal to wrought-iron, not a sound one had been left in his body.
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