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Stir thyself, Starbuck! stave it off move, move! speak aloud! Mast-head there! See ye my boy's hand on the hill? Crazed; aloft there! keep thy keenest eye upon the boats: "Mark well the whale! Ho! again! drive off that hawk! see! he pecks he tears the vane" pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck "Ha! he soars away with it!
I thought he would surely rest there, but away he was again, nor did he stop till he had got hold of the main-truck; and, as he clung on with his chin over it, he took off his cap and waved it round his head. My blood was warmed with the exercise and the excitement, and I was close after him.
"'I'd a partner, said he, 'a rare good man, as true as a stock to a barrel. He's got the dibbs, he has, and where do you think he is at this moment? Why, he's the chaplain of this ship the chaplain, no less! He came aboard with a black coat and his papers right, and money enough in his box to buy the thing right up from keel to main-truck. The crew are his, body and soul.
But when, all too soon, the sun went down in a blaze of golden and crimson and purple splendour, no sign of the boats had been seen; Mendouca, therefore, worked out a calculation of the distance run by the brigantine from the spot where the squall first struck her, subtracted from it the distance that the boats would probably traverse in the same time, and having worked up to this spot as nearly as he could calculate, he hove-to for the night, with a bright lantern at his main-truck, firing signal rockets at intervals of a quarter of an hour, and wearing the ship round on the other tack every two hours.
A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm, "But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?
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