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"Out av me way, Michael, lad, till I get a kick at his slats!" crooned Terence P. Reardon, heaving alongside. "You gossoon! Take care of the scuttle; don't let them close it down, or they'll submerge and drown us. Leave this lad to me, I tell you. He's the captain, and why shouldn't he be killed by one of his own rank?" Thus rebuked, Terence curbed his blood-thirsty proclivities.
The worst feature of these billets was the rats. They were the biggest I ever saw, great, filthy, evil-smelling, grayish-red fellows, as big as a good-sized cat. They would hop out of the walls and scuttle across your face with their wet, cold feet, and it was enough to drive you insane. One chap in our party had a natural horror of rats, and he nearly went crazy.
Often, I used to watch the tidy good-wife, seated at the open little scuttle, like a woman at a cottage door, engaged in knitting socks for her husband; or perhaps, cutting his hair, as he kneeled before her.
"Because we might have filled the projectile with useful objects, books, instruments, tools, etc. We could have thrown them all out, and all would have followed in our train. But happy thought! Why cannot we walk outside like the meteor? Why cannot we launch into space through the scuttle?
When at last I sealed the envelope it was on a single sheet of paper, bearing a few formal words, while the scuttle by the fireplace held all my fine sentiments in the torn slips of paper I had tossed there. I told Mary that I knew that she did not care for me and had found herself out.
Lying extended as flat as before, Captain Shirril placed his ear close to the door and listened. Within the first minute he caught a sound, but it was so faint and indefinite that he could not tell what it meant. It might have been caused by someone moving about in the room directly below, but he was inclined to believe that the Comanche was still near the scuttle and was trying to get his range.
They steal round the galley and will nibble the carrots or turnips if his back is turned for one minute; and then he throws something at them and misses them; and they scuttle off laughing impudently, and flick one ear at him from a safe distance. This is the most impudent gesture I ever saw. Winking is nothing to it.
I want three," remarked Alma with complacency, "and besides, there is plenty of driftwood at Golovin on the beach which we could have for nothing, and save buying coal at three dollars a sack as we do here," glancing at the scuttle near the range reproachfully, as if the poor, inanimate thing was to blame for prices. Little Alma was keen at a bargain.
But I did not believe this; for when the suicide came rushing and shrieking up the scuttle, they looked as frightened as I did; and besides that, and what makes their being frightened still plainer, is the fact, that if they had had any presence of mind, they could have prevented his plunging overboard, since he brushed right by them.
Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.
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