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For the next fifteen minutes I was busy hugging a bridge stanchion, dodging flying wreckage and trying to breathe; for, driven by the violence of the wind, the rain came horizontally in such suffocatingly hot dense masses as nearly to stifle one. It was the watch of Second Mate Isitt.
The ship rolled into Queenstown one bright morning, and Ivan and his nine hundred steerage companions crowded the for'ard deck. A boy in a rowboat threw a line to the deck, and after it had been fastened to a stanchion he came up hand over hand. The emigrants watched him curiously.
His right arm was stretched taut and helpless, like a rope holding up the frightful and ever-increasing weight that hung between him and the sea. His breast was pressed against the rail and his left hand gripped the iron stanchion to keep himself from going over. He felt that his feet were slipping, and he set his teeth and gripped the iron with a grasp that was itself like iron.
"I'm turnin' the water in slow," he announced. "That'll give me time to git away. This is a divin' boat. Well, Dive in her!" In that first awful moment after he was left alone, Jack Benson's first feeling was that it must all be an unbelievable dream. Yet he knew that it was not. In his frenzy he tugged at the handcuffs, fought with the cords that bound him to the stanchion, but all in vain.
There was but an uneasy murmuring of wave to wave; a whispering of wind, that stooped its wing and hissed along the surface, and withdrew into the mystery of clouds again; a momentary chafing of churned water round the harbour piers, subsiding into silence petulant and sullen. I leaned against an iron stanchion and longed for the sea's message.
"About thirty feet. It was not an easy matter to bring up the body." "We will examine the pit and the footprints later," said Mr. Cromering. "Let us go inside first." Picking their way across the common to the front of the inn, they encountered a little group of men conversing underneath the rusty old anchor signboard which dangled from a stout stanchion above the front door of the inn.
He also did some more tying of knots and shifting of buckles, roped the chair to a stanchion, and made sure that Reblong could not undo himself. "It's up to you," said Fort with the new light in his eyes. "You run this thing as it ought to be run, and you're safe. Trick me in any way, and I'll get you!" Reblong took a single look at those eyes.
Lumps of green cold water toppled over the bulwark and on their heads. They hung for a moment on strained arms, with the breath knocked out of them, and with closed eyes then, letting go with one hand, balanced with lolling heads, trying to grab some rope or stanchion further forward.
My feet were just off the stanchion, when she struck fairly into the middle of the sea, and it washed her fore and aft, burying her in the water. As soon as she rose out of it, I looked aft, and everything forward of the main-mast, except the long-boat, which was griped and double-lashed down to the ring-bolts, was swept off clear.
As soon as the boat is brought nigh enough to the shore he who stands by the bulkhead takes instantly a turn with the hawser about the bulkhead stanchion; and that stops her fast before the sea can turn her aside: and when the two men have got in their lading they haul off to sea till they come a little without the swell; where they remove the salt into another boat that carries it on board the ship.
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