Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/288

276 was a lively voyage! Oh, yes! For those who like that kind of liveliness.

Everything went wrong, just in the old sweet way. Rudd had to sleep with his engines. As sure as he turned his back on them for five consecutive minutes something happened. I began to wonder if we shouldn’t have got on faster if we had had sweeps aboard. You don’t often see hands starting to row a steamer along. But anything was better than standing still; or being blown back—which was worse. It was no use rigging a sail against the winds we had, or we might have tried that. But the wind was against us, like everything else.

The weather seemed to have cleared on purpose to give us a chance of getting the Great Joss aboard. It broke again directly afterwards. More than once, and more than twice, I wished it hadn’t. Then perhaps we shouldn’t have been favoured with the company of Mr. Batters. In shipping him we’d shipped a Tartar. I became inclined to the belief that we owed half of our bad luck to him. The crew was dead sure that at his door could be laid the lot of it. They swore he was the devil himself, or his brother.

I wasn’t sure they were far out. Either what he had gone through had affected his brain, or he was possessed by the spirit of mischief, or there was something uncanny about him. I never knew any-