Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/62

50 their hands, or shifting from one foot to another in child like awe, the captain read a brief burial service. Then the weighted form dropped into the sea.

In the late afternoon, the second officer approached the quarter-deck.

"Jones and that damned squarehead Swanson have smuggled a jug o' Jamaicy in the foc's'le 'n are raisin' seven kinds o' hell."

Ordered on deck, that amiable pair became drunkenly mutinous, until Ben knocked them into the scuppers. Buckets of cold sea water revived them, and they returned to their duties, but in a sullen manner that boded further trouble.

Meanwhile the barometer was falling steadily. Twilight and the dog-watch came, but the haze on the horizon was even thicker and more ominous than the twilight. The wind shifted again, tuning the countless harps of the shrouds to an alarming concert-pitch.

"Port y'r 'elm two points," called Ben; "Port-ellum-two-points-sir," the man at the wheel, and the ship came up into the wind. Another short command, and swiftly as circus hands striking a tent, little dark figures scurried up the tall spars into the commingled clouds of mist and canvas, and, curled perilously on yard-arms describing violent arcs on the sky, gathered in the crackling ghostly cupolas.

The gallant white towers had fallen now, and shorn of all but a little reefed square of topsail, two tiny mutton-legs of storm-jib and spanker, the Provincetown bowled along through the murk, holding well to her course, when the real gale struck her. For a moment she trembled through all