Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/343

Rh While this was going on, other crews, dropping their oars to use grappling-hooks, grappled the stern of the ship, climbed hand over hand to the deck, and crowded there before the captain had come to the end of his chaplet of imprecations.

The crew no longer struggled, or only paid slight attention to their orders. In truth, the sailors covenanted with the invaders. The approach to port had softened these hardy fellows, discipline had been relaxed; they were as puerile and distracted as schoolboys on the eve of vacation. From the mouth of the Scheldt, in the less biting wind that blew from the land, these prisoners had sniffed the bouquet of future liberties and noisily sniffed the odor of the hospitable brothel.

Far from bearing a grudge against these wily pilots who flung themselves at their necks only to fleece them anew by exploiting the sudden pangs of their passions, the good-natured fellows welcomed them as heralds of approaching blow-outs and relaxations.

No less than thirty boats, each one manned by two or three runners, clung to the carcass of The Dolphin with the ineluctable stubbornness of an octopus. While the sailors organized a show of resistance, pushing the invaders lightly off to the larboard, the latter were boarding them from the starboard. Pushed back from the stern, the rascals threw themselves aft, where, massing together for a single stroke, they began mounting upon each other's shoulders.

One climbed upon the shoulders or sat upon the head of another, who balanced all his weight upon the shoulder-blades of a third. The bottom man supported the weight of another comrade, upon whom a fifth had just perched, and so it kept up. The men at the