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Updated: May 17, 2025
Two or three small craft were, like them selves, riding at anchor, their decks wet and deserted; others were getting under way to take advantage of the tide, which had just turned. "Up with the anchor," said the skipper, seizing a handspike and thrusting it into the windlass. As the rusty chain came in, an ominous growling came from below, and Bill snatched his handspike out and raised it aloft.
"A good throw," he muttered, and hauled it in. The hawser followed the heaving line, and Nelson and Bowen, with life-lines about them, bent the stubborn end of it around the windlass. It was heavy work, even for two men, on the tumbling, slippery deck, and, that done, they turned, anxiously, to see how the man in the stern of the tug was making out.
Never had the Annamites and the Chinamen, who in Saigon act as stevedores, appeared to him so lazy, so intolerable. Sometimes he felt as if, seeing or guessing his impatience, they were trying to irritate him by moving the bales with the utmost slowness, and walking with unbearable laziness around with the windlass.
Soo-ee!" The developments, however, were not of an encouraging nature. In addition to a capacity for food which placed the Reeds among the world's marvels they were of a slowness of movement Wallie never had seen equalled. Whenever he looked through the window, it was to see one or the other resting from the exertion of emptying a bucket of dirt or turning the windlass.
With a most hearty loathing for the lower depths of baseness uncovered by craven fear, one may be none the less a helpless victim of a certain ruthless and malign ferocity to which it is likely to give birth. Sitting with my back propped against the windlass and the newly purchased rifle across my knees, I found that cowardice, like other base passions, may suddenly develop an infection.
"Oh, Marah," I cried, "don't let him go like that. Go and buy him back. He doesn't deserve to end like that." "Rot!" said Marah, turning on his heel. "Hands up anchor! Forward to the windlass, Jim. You know your duty." The men ran to their places. Very soon we were under sail again, out at sea, with the Spanish coast in the distance astern, a line of bluish hills, almost like clouds.
From the barn yards come the pounding of the steam thresher or the creak of a windlass, suggesting that the hay crop is being baled. Everything is busy but the cows, who evidently do not like frosting on their cake and, having the day before them, can afford to wait till the good sun comes along to undo the work which has kept Jack Frost so busy all night.
As it was now getting past the usual breakfast hour, some cold meat was got out, and, for the first time since Mark had been transferred to the cabin, they sat down on the windlass and ate the meal together.
The jib and staysail, also, I could not hoist: they were lying in a heap on the windlass with a dead nigger on top, and, further aft, were another two of the gentry, one dead and one with a smashed thigh bone. I slung the wounded man overboard to the sharks, and then began to consider what was best to do.
The mine consisted of a horizontal shaft, cut into the mountain-side, that had reached a depth of between two and three hundred feet; the ore being drawn up in large leathern buckets, by mule power, attached to a windlass. Such portions as were deemed sufficiently rich were at once conveyed to the smelting furnace, where the pure ore was melted down and extracted from the virgin fossil.
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