"Thirteen for a fair average since five o'clock yesterday afternoon,"
he exulted. "In the squalls she makes all of sixteen, which is going
some, for the Elsinore."
"I'd take the crojack off if I had charge," Margaret criticised.
"So would I, so would I, Miss West," he replied; "if we hadn't been
six weeks already off the Horn."
She ran her eyes aloft, spar by spar, past the spars of hollow steel
to the wooden royals, which bent in the gusts like bows in some
invisible archer's hands.
"They're remarkably good sticks of timber," was her comment.
"Well may you say it, Miss West," he agreed. "I'd never a-believed
they'd a-stood it myself. But just look at 'm! Just look at 'm!"
There was no breakfast for the men. Three times the galley had been
washed out, and the men, in the forecastle awash, contented
themselves with hard tack and cold salt horse. Aft, with us, the
steward scalded himself twice ere he succeeded in making coffee over
a kerosene-burner.
At noon we picked up a ship ahead, a lime-juicer, travelling in the
same direction, under lower-topsails and one upper-topsail.
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