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Updated: May 23, 2025
Up to their two long death-dealing batteries, the trained men of the Serapis stood and toiled in mechanical magic of discipline. They tended those rows of guns, as Lowell girls the rows of looms in a cotton factory. The Parcae were not more methodical; Atropos not more fatal; the automaton chess-player not more irresponsible. "Look, lad; I want a grenade, now, thrown down their main hatchway.
If some of my readers have never been in a ship, let them try to imagine themselves descending from the upper deck where all the masts stand by a ladder fixed in a square opening known as a hatchway. About six feet down this ladder is the 'tweendecks, a long narrow room, with a ceiling so low that unless you bend, you bump your head against the beams.
Mordaunt answered only by a terrible laugh, threw his torch into the sea and plunged in after it. The instant Groslow put his foot upon the hatchway steps the ship opened like the crater of a volcano.
It was a side corridor, and a blind alley; it ended in a large hatchway marked HYDROPONICS, and there were no branching corridors. If he were discovered here, there would be no place to hide. But he knew that he could never hope to accomplish his purpose here.... A hatch clanged open, and there were more footsteps down the main corridor as a change of guards hurried by.
"I am buried alive!" he cried, bitterly; "they have hidden me under mountains. I shall be here till I rot. Why the blazes should it matter to them whether I am dirty or clean." Every morning and evening an iron hatchway opened in his oblong cell, and a brown hairy hand or two thrust in a plate of perfectly cooked lentils and a big bowl of cocoa.
The pulse beat fast and furious. In gangs at every hatchway you saw men heaving, sweating, you heard them swearing, panting. That day they worked straight through the night. For the pulse kept beating, beating, and the ship must sail on time! And now I too worked day and night. In the weeks that followed, Abner Bell came and went many times, but for me it was my entire life.
In obedience to the lieutenant's command two of the men had gone forward and were descending through the open hatchway into the hold. While the deserters held the rest of the men in talk, the bosun strolled carelessly after the two, and as soon as they had disappeared, quietly clapped on the hatch and battened it down.
When he had made a circuit round all the places frequented by the beau-monde, to the utter confusion of those against whom his resentment was kindled; paid off his debts, and settled his money matters in town, Hatchway was dismissed to the country, in order to prepare for the reception of his fair Emilia.
If we could only nurse him back to life, I thought, he could perhaps tell me a lot of things. The log on which he hung had come out of the mouth of the creek and he couldn't have been more than half a day on it by my calculation. I had him taken down the main hatchway and put into a hammock in the 'tween-decks.
Colodia!" yelled his three mates in wild excitement. "Hurray!" "Well done, Colodia!" echoed a voice behind them, and Ensign MacMasters appeared from the after hatchway, with the commanding officer of the S. P. 888 in his wake. Some of the chaser's crew were now approaching the scene from forward.
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