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Now and then the scallawag sailors would force them upon all fours, and sitting astride their backs would compel them to creep about the deck, pretending to be horses, while Condent whipped them smartly with the rope's end. Thinking to save his precious twine, he ordered these monks to pray for favoring winds, and he kept them on their marrow bones petitioning from daylight until sunset.
And what was the worst of all, whenever Keola found a chance to sleep, there was the mate awake and stirring him up with a rope's end. Keola saw it would never do; and he made up his mind to run away. They were about a month out from Honolulu when they made the land.
"Can you spare a hand to catch, Dick?" shouted Dave. "Surely!" came back the steady answer. The coil flew out across the thin ice. One end splashed in the water. Guiding the all but helpless Fred, Dick swam to the rope's end. Further back the two men who held to the rope connecting with Dave had seated themselves across the second raft.
Then he used to kick the lad down the fo'castle ladder; he used to work him, sick or well, as he wouldn't have worked a dray-horse; he used to chase him all about deck at the rope's end; he used to mast-head him for hours on the stretch; he used to starve him out in the hold.
"What a young Tiger-cub it is!" he would say sometimes, swaying about his Rope's End, as if undecided whether to hit me or not. "Lie down, Rawbones! Lie down, Tearem!" "You go to hit me again," I would cry, all hot and flurried; "I'll mark you, I will, you Tarpaulin Hedgehog!"
This personage, by the way, was looked up to as a kind of Mogul even by his commander, but especially by the younger apprentices. He claimed the right indeed to chastise a wayward youth with the rope's end, and when very bad offences occurred, a double punishment was inflicted by keeping the little delinquent on deck in the cold at night, until his superior thought fit to pardon him.
Here, I'll go down first to see if the rope's safe, and ready to knock over any of them sojers if he tries to stop us. The young gent had better come next, and you last. You'll have to leave the rope to get back after you have seen us a bit on the way. But hold hard a minute. How long is that rope?" "About thirty yards," said Waller.
Most of them went up the side like cats, leaping for the chains and dead-eyes, slashing at the nettings, swinging by a rope's end, or digging their toes in a crack of a gun-port. Forward they were pouring over the bowsprit, vaulting like acrobats from the anchor stocks, or swarming up the stays.
"Old man's piling up the rocks. 'Don't want to be disturbed, I guess. He'll find out his error a few years from now. 'Pity, because there's a heap of good in the boy if you could get at it." "Mit a rope's end; mit a rope's end!" growled the German.
Pass him along, Tom Platt, an' we'll larn him." "'Tain't my trick this time," grinned Dan. "You've got to go it alone. Dad learned me with a rope's end." For an hour Long Jack walked his prey up and down, teaching, as he said, "things at the sea that ivry man must know, blind, dhrunk, or asleep."
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