Page:The Dark Frigate (Hawes).djvu/104

Thanks to the storm, and the labour and anxiety it brought all hands, Martin, the latter part of that day, escaped the duties of ship’s liar, and glad was he of the chance to slip unobserved about the deck with no reminder of his late humiliation. But by night he was blue with the cold, and drenching wet and so hungry that he gnawed at a bit of biscuit when he needed both hands to haul on a rope.

Finding Phil Marsham at his shoulder and still re- senting bitterly the jest to which he had fallen victim, he shot at him an ill-tempered glance and in sullen silence turned his back.

“Belay!”

A line of struggling men tripped and stumbled as they secured the rope and went swaying and staggering across the deck when the ship rolled; for the weight of her towering superstructure and her cannon would set her wallowing fearfully in the merest seaway. One caught up the rope’s end in loose coils; another, having fallen, got clumsily on his feet and staunched his bleeding nose; the rest shivered as the icy wind struck through their wet shirts.

Martin again turned his back on the boatswain and hugged himself, but to little profit, although his fat arms covered a goodly area. Phil laughed softly at Martin’s show of spleen and was about to warm the man’s temper further by a thrust well calculated to stir him to fury, when the ship rose with a queer lurch and descended into a veritable gulf.

They saw above them a sea looming like a black cloud. It mounted slowly up, hung over them, curled down a dark tongue of water and, before the Rose of Devon had righted from her plunge into the trough,