"
"Quit it! Quit it!" Mr. Pike roared. "This ain't a funeral! Ain't
there one of you that can sing? Come on, now! It's a topsail-yard--
"
He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out
of the men's hands to put into them the right rope.
"Come on, bosun! Break her out!"
Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers' voice, cracked and crazy
and even more lugubrious than Nancy's:
"Then up aloft that yard must go,
Whiskey for my Johnny."
The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two
men feebly mumbled it. Sundry Buyers quavered the next line:
"Oh, whiskey killed my sister Sue."
Then Mr. Pike took a hand, seizing the hauling-part next to the pin
and lifting his voice with a rare snap and devilishness:
"And whiskey killed the old man, too,
Whiskey for my Johnny."
He sang the devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the
work and to the chorused emphasis of "Whiskey for my Johnny."
And to his voice they pulled, they moved, they sang, and were alive,
until he interrupted the song to cry "Belay!"
And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again
maundering and futile things, getting in one another's way, stumbling
and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and,
when they did take hold, invariably taking hold of the wrong rope
first.
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