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"I taught you to swim when you wasn't much bigger than a marlinespike, an' to make boats a'most before you could handle a clasp-knife without cuttin' your fingers, an' now that you've come to man's estate nothin'll please me more than to make a diver of you. But," continued Baldwin, while a shade clouded his wrinkled and weatherbeaten visage, "I can't let you go down in the dress without leave.
It was entirely possible, we agreed, that the marlinespike had been so disposed, as some seaman's resort in time of need. The cook, taking down the dinner on Friday evening, reported Mr. Turner up and about and partly dressed. The heat was frightful. All day we had had a following breeze, and it had been necessary to lengthen the towing-rope, dropping the jolly-boat well behind us.
That shover man let out a hair-raisin' yell, hauled the nickel marlinespike over in its rack, and squeezed a rubber bag that was spliced to the steerin' wheel. There was a half dozen toots or howls or honks from under our bows somewheres, and then that automobile hopped off the ground and commenced to fly. The fust hop landed me on my knees in the cockpit, and there I stayed.
Griffith, without waiting for a second bidding, hastened to Borroughcliffe with his intelligence. "His side-arms!" repeated the soldier, when the other had done; "what are they, I pray thee a marlinespike! For if his equipments be no better than thine own, my worthy prisoner, there is little need to quarrel about their ownership."
He was a trim-built, well-favored young fellow, with more refinement in his face than most sailors can show; yet there was no lack of seamanly deftness in the fingers which balled up the spun yarn and threw a half-hitch with the bight of the lanyard over the point of the marlinespike which hung to his neck. As he climbed the steps, the girl faced him, looking squarely into his eyes.
Captain Helfrich had hitherto taken no notice whatever of me, and he seemed to me so awful a person, that I never expected to be spoken to by him. Now and then the mates ordered me to do some little job or other, to fetch a swab or a marlinespike, or to hold a paint-pot, but they in no other way noticed me.
That is to say, he hauled a nickel-plated marlinespike thing toward him, shoved another one away from him, took a twist on the steerin' wheel, the gocart coughed like a horse with the heaves, started up some sort of buzz-planer underneath, and then we begun to move.
Burns, on watch at the companionway, ran forward with his revolver, and narrowly escaped being brained Adams at that moment flinging down a marlinespike that he had carried aloft with him. I heard the crash and joined Burns, and together we went over the deck and, both houses.
When Bill was a baby a round-faced, large-eyed, fat-legged baby, as unlike to the bronzed, whiskered, strapping seaman who went by the name of "Fighting Bill" as a jackdaw is to a marlinespike when Bill was a baby, his father used to say he was just cut out for a sailor; and he was right, for the urchin was overflowing with vigour and muscular energy.
At any other time the boy would have expressed a doubt as to the possibility of the Grampus having, at any period of his existence, been so short as "half the length of a marlinespike;" but, being very imaginative by nature, and having been encouraged to believe in ghosts by education, he was too frightened to be funny.
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