"
Not until the job was done and I was back on the poop did I have time
to work out the drift of that last figure in its terms of the sea.
Mulligan Jacobs might have been an artist, a philosophic poet, had he
not been born crooked with a crooked back.
And we smashed the boats. With axes and sledges it was an easier
task than I had imagined. On top of both houses we left the boats
masses of splintered wreckage, the topaz-eyed ones working most
energetically; and we regained the poop without a shot being fired.
The forecastle turned out, of course, at our noise, but made no
attempt to interfere with us.
And right here I register another complaint against the sea-
novelists. A score of men for'ard, desperate all, with desperate
deeds behind them, and jail and the gallows facing them not many days
away, should have only begun to fight. And yet this score of men did
nothing while we destroyed their last chance for escape.
"But where did they get the grub?" the steward asked me afterwards.
This question he has asked me every day since the first day Mr.
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