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Updated: May 16, 2025
Well, it's better than the mop Pete swabs up the floors with. If you'd said that, I'd sure have gone straight off into a trance, and and got buried alive. But your appetite's awful, Kate, and I can't sit here forever. I'd say food's mighty important, but it's nothing beside a man waiting for you somewhere, and you don't know where. Guess I'll have something to eat before I go to bed.
"They're like you afraid of that rotten old volcano." "Blime me! Hand wye wouldn't they be scare't hof hit?" snarled the Cockney. "That bein' the general feelin'," Ditty said calmly, "why we'll stick to my plan. Let the old man dig it up hisself and bring it aboard. "It'll save us the trouble, won't it? And mebbe we can git rid of some of the swabs, one at a time " "Huh!" chuckled Bingo.
He discharged his pebble, but with no result. "Miss; high right," said Jack. "Where did you get your elastic from?" "The tube of me filter. I'll take a finer sight next time," and "Swabs" went stalking off in search of further sport. "It seems hard to imagine that we're on the real business at last," said Jack, clasping his hands behind his head and stretching out his legs.
The decks were scrubbed down with a mixture of vinegar and sand, and then sluiced with salt water, scraped with metal scrapers, and dried with swabs and small portable firepots. Vinegar was carried about the decks in large iron pots, and converted into vapour by the insertion of red-hot metal bars.
Sooner or later he must go before the "gent with the swabs" and be "regulated," that is to say, stripped to the waist, or further if that exacting officer deemed it advisable, and be critically examined for physical ailments and bodily defects.
That's what must be done." This was not bad advice on the part of Smallbones the ship's company agreed to it, and the corporal perceived the propriety of it. In the meantime, the dog had retreated to the cabin, and his howlings had gradually ceased; but he had left a track of blood along the deck, and down the ladder, which Dick Short perceiving, pointed to it, and cried out "Swabs."
The watch was employed in washing down decks, the men and boys paddling about with their trousers tucked up to their knees, some with buckets of water, which they were heaving about in every direction, now and then giving a shipmate, when the first lieutenant's eye was off them, the benefit of a shower-bath: others were wielding huge swabs, slashing them down right and left, with loud thuds, and ill would it have fared with any incautious landsman who might have got within their reach.
Nearly all of them terminated in a dense tuft at the top, beneath which the stem would be bare for several feet, giving them the appearance, my friend said, as they stood sharply defined along the crests of the mountains, of cannon swabs. Endless, interminable successions of these cannon swabs, each just like its fellow, came and went, came and went, all day.
His head emerged into the clean, sweet air blowing across the deck. He drew a breath to the very bottom of his lungs. Then from behind and below him came the voice again. "Gimme a drink!" it wailed. "Gimme a drink of water. Ain't one of you cussed swabs got decency enough to fetch me a drink? I'm dyin' for a drink, I tell you. I'm dyin'!" The minister stood still, his feet on the ladder.
"I don't see that," Drew muttered. "Why, we know his plans. He don't know ours," explained the old man. "We haven't got to worry about them swabs till we've found the doubloons, anyway." "If we find 'em," murmured the captain. "By George! we're bound to find 'em," Tyke said, with confidence. "That's what we come down here for." His enthusiasm seemed unquenched.
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