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Weather main-braces, the rest o' you! Slack away to looward! Round wi' the yards, you farmers round wi' 'em! Down wi' the wheel, there! Bring her up three points and hold her. H l an' blazes, what's he firin' on me for?" Excitedly, the men obeyed him; they were not used to gun fire, and it is certainly exciting to be shot at.
She made a pretty enough picture as she knelt, the "skirt" round the waist looking not unlike a striped bath-towel, her small face intent, and filled with the seriousness of the job on hand, and her lips puckered out at the heat of the fire. "It's so hot!" she cried in self-defence, after the first of the accidents. "Of course it's hot," said Dick, "if you stick to looward of the fire.
When a man looks overside and says ten knots and better, and the log says ten knots and a shade, he ain't no landsman. He spits to looward like a commodore, that parson, and I've had my suspicions right along." "All buncombe. You been readin' too many Manila newspapers." "Yes, and I see a few things on deck, too, that ain't got nothin' to do with newspapers.
Hails me, the varmint does. Vesp and I, we work the printing-press together, an' so order him to looward, not to taint our Otaheitans, that stink of ile at home, but I had 'em biled before I'd buy 'em, an' now they're vilets.
Yet it never occurred to me that the wonderful and technically correct marines hanging on his walls were due to anything but the artist's conscientious study of his subject, and only his casual mispronounciation of the word "leeward," which landsmen pronounce as spelled, but which rolls off the tongue of a sailor, be he former dock rat or naval officer, as "looward," and his giving the long sounds to the vowels of the words "patent" and "tackle," that induced me to ask if he had ever been to sea.
"We could not help them; she was a Yankee craft, and there was not a life buoy or belt on board; and who, with another big wave coming, would swim down to looward with a line? "Landsmen, especially women and boys, have often asked me why a wooden ship, filled with water, sinks, even though not weighted with cargo.
"No captains here," growled one, while the rest eyed Seldom reprovingly. "Well, there ought to be; you're all rattled, and don't know any more than to let thousands o' dollars slip past you. There's salvage down to looward." "Salvage?" "Yes, salvage. Big boat full o' passengers and valuable cargo shoals to looward of him can't steer. You poor fools, what ails you?"
As Rogers struggled to his feet he said: "You pass to looward o' me when we meet, or I'll make you jump overboard!" And again Rogers saw the wisdom of silence and went on to the forecastle.
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