PART FIVE: My Sea Adventure
Chapter 23: The Ebb-tide Runs
(continued)
The endless ballad had come to an end at last, and the
whole diminished company about the camp-fire had broken
into the chorus I had heard so often:
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
I was just thinking how busy drink and the devil were
at that very moment in the cabin of the HISPANIOLA,
when I was surprised by a sudden lurch of the coracle.
At the same moment, she yawed sharply and seemed to
change her course. The speed in the meantime had
strangely increased.
I opened my eyes at once. All round me were little
ripples, combing over with a sharp, bristling sound and
slightly phosphorescent. The HISPANIOLA herself, a
few yards in whose wake I was still being whirled
along, seemed to stagger in her course, and I saw her
spars toss a little against the blackness of the night;
nay, as I looked longer, I made sure she also was
wheeling to the southward.
I glanced over my shoulder, and my heart jumped against
my ribs. There, right behind me, was the glow of the
camp-fire. The current had turned at right angles,
sweeping round along with it the tall schooner and the
little dancing coracle; ever quickening, ever bubbling
higher, ever muttering louder, it went spinning through
the narrows for the open sea.
Suddenly the schooner in front of me gave a violent
yaw, turning, perhaps, through twenty degrees; and
almost at the same moment one shout followed another
from on board; I could hear feet pounding on the
companion ladder and I knew that the two drunkards had
at last been interrupted in their quarrel and awakened
to a sense of their disaster.
I lay down flat in the bottom of that wretched skiff and
devoutly recommended my spirit to its Maker. At the end
of the straits, I made sure we must fall into some bar
of raging breakers, where all my troubles would be ended
speedily; and though I could, perhaps, bear to die, I could
not bear to look upon my fate as it approached.
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