Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/151

Rh sweating, in their blue undershirts, with tattooed arms bare: all this, and the slow process of time on the ocean, the lazy afternoons on deck, the long yarns and longer silences by starlight, and at last the sight of the great rock Gibraltar rising vaguely ahead in a shimmer of brown morning haze, were enough to make the thoughts of a healthy boy fly forward rather than astern.

On the ninety-seventh day the Merry Andrew tied up at the long stone quay in Palermo, on the island of Sicily. Then there were stirring times. Captain Cyrus Harlow brought papers out of his cabin and went ashore, flushed with the new dignity of international affairs, blowing his great nose like a herald's blast before him. Angelo and the other Italians became mad creatures, and jabbered with gestures as of life and death among the stevedores who bundled the shooks up from the dark hole. And Marden loafed on deck with the Yankees, happy to watch these swarthy people work so fast in the heat that quivered on the quay, to admire the foreign city with its strangely fashioned