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Updated: July 31, 2024
It was then lowered to the bottom; a small pig of ballast was got on deck and slung to another rope's-end, and I then went below and changed my dress for an old white shirt and duck trousers, buckling a belt round my waist, to which, as it happened, a strong sharp sheath-knife was attached.
"A man in the forepeak, and dead, is he, bosun? I'll bet I'll soon quicken him into life again with a rope's-end!" He muttered these last words as he hastily scrambled down the poop ladder and along the weather side of the main-deck towards the forecastle, making his way forward with an activity which might have shamed a younger man.
Past main and foremasts I crept, past dark store-rooms and cubby-holes, and so to a crack of light, and clapping my eye thereto, espied two fellows rolling dice and beyond them the boy, his hands lashed miserably to a staple in the bulkhead, his little body writhing under the cruel blows of a rope's-end wielded by a great, red-headed fellow.
And he took a fresh grip upon the rope's-end with which he was threatening the man. "Drop that rope's-end at once, you scoundrel!"
A rope's-end, to which the other end of the hawser was attached, was then promptly hove from the boat alongside and smartly hauled inboard over the ship's bows, and several turns of the hawser were taken round the windlass-bitts.
I won't stand it, that I won't;" and he blubbered as few have blubbered before. "You will, will you, you young scamp?" exclaimed the carpenter, seizing a rope's-end. "Take that, then, and remember, when you come back from the drowning of yourself, I'll give you six times as much." And poor Bobby got it worse than ever. I think Chissel was very wrong in the way he treated the poor wretch.
"Aint there any more liquor ashore?" "If there is, I don't know where it is." "Then find out, and be quick about it, or I'll give you the rope's-end!" roared the unreasonable mate. The loud talking aroused Dick, and he soon came out. "What's the matter here?" he asked. "Oh, so you have woke up," he went on to Jack Lesher. "Yes, I'm awake, Rover.
Not a day passed, scarcely an hour, that he did not taste the flavour of a rope's-end most frequently bestowed by his master, the carpenter. "You will be the death of me, I know you will, Master Chissel," he groaned out one day, when his castigator was even severer than usual. "I'll go and drown myself, that I will, if this goes on much longer you'll see if I don't.
Overhead, the wild huntsman of the storm passed continuously in one blare of mingled noises; screaming wind, straining timber, lashing rope's-end, pounding block and bursting sea contributed; and I could have thought there was at times another, a more piercing, a more human note, that dominated all, like the wailing of an angel; I could have thought I knew the angel's name, and that his wings were black.
"Yet I would it were but summer and a clear day," grumbled the outlaw, "that I might see myself in the mirror of a pool. There be many of Sir Daniel's men that know me; and if we fell to be recognised, there might be two words for you, brother, but as for me, in a paternoster while, I should be kicking in a rope's-end."
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