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It did, after the exercise of a fair amount of pressure; and then, by the help of Tom Jecks, who was wonderfully penitent now, and eager to help with a tool he brought to wit, a marlinespike the star-like points of tin were one by one forced out, and the tail withdrawn uninjured, except that the silk ribbon at the end was a good deal frayed. "Ha!" ejaculated Tom. "We've made an end of it at last.
"They put a large marlinespike into one of their guns," the indignant captain tells us, "which struck the carriage of the chase gun upon our forecastle, dented it near two inches, then broke asunder and wounded one of the men in the leg, and had it come a yard higher, must infallibly have killed two or three. By all this behaviour I concluded she must be an English vessel taken by the Spaniards.
"Why, I once was in a ship where, after we had carried away our masts, we were obliged to run under a marlinespike stuck up in the bows, but even that was too much for her, and we were obliged to send the carpenter forward with a sledge-hammer to take a reef in it by driving it further into the deck. It must blow hard, you'll allow, when it becomes necessary to take a reef in a marlinespike.
Five times a giant shark launched himself at their boat, head on, and drove them frantic with his menace of sinking them. They were so filled with this dread that they fastened a marlinespike in the spar, and despite probability of provoking the shark to more desperate onslaughts, maneuvered so that they were able to kill him with a blow.
The change from cracking ice from a ship's deck with a marlinespike, to currying and feeding something alive and warm and comfortable, was so delightful to the Swede that he had given up the sea for a while. He had felt that he could ship again at anytime, the water was so near. As the months went by, however, he, too, gradually fell under the spell of Tom's influence.
He felt the aching sensation in his lungs coming from suppressed breathing, and swam blindly in the darkness, not knowing in which direction was the surface, until he felt the marlinespike still fastened to his neck extending off to the right.
If it wa'n't for ow, Josephus Henry! for this rheumatiz, I'd be aboard the Benn this minute with a marlinespike in my hand, and op'nin' a fresh package of language." "But you ain't fit for the sea no longer," mumbled One-arm Jerry through one corner of the mouth that paralysis had drawn awry. "That's what I told the owners of the Benn when I fit 'em off'm me and resigned," agreed the Cap'n.
It was Jones, of course, who attacked Burns and secured the key to the captain's cabin; Jones who threw the axe overboard after hearing the crew tell that on its handle were finger-prints to identify the murderer; Jones who, while on guard in the after house below, had pushed the key to the storeroom under Turner's door; Jones who hung the marlinespike over the side, waiting perhaps for another chance at Singleton; Jones, in his devotional attire, who had frightened the crew into hysteria, and who, discovered by Mrs.
Off in the stern was a vague mass which proved to be a few yards of canvas carefully tented on the floor. Some gimcrack belonging to the ship's ornamentation had been freshly gilded and left to dry, protected by an old sail-cloth. This, weighted down by a rusty marlinespike, spread couchwise along the taffrail, and offered to Jim just the bed he longed for.
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