I Have Seen Him Slink Off With Backward Looks Of Terror
And Offended Delicacy, While The Other, In His Witty, Ugly Way, Had
Been Professing Hostility To God, And An Extreme Theatrical
Readiness To Be Shipwrecked On The Spot.
These utterances hurt the
little coachman's modesty like a bad word.
THE SICK MAN
One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself were walking arm-
in-arm and briskly up and down the deck. Six bells had rung; a
head-wind blew chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a
sprinkle of rain, and the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now
divided time with its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull,
thrilling and intense like a mosquito. Even the watch lay
somewhere snugly out of sight.
For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud. We ran
to the rails. An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it
was impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his
belly in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread
toes. We asked him what was amiss, and he replied incoherently,
with a strange accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he
had cramp in the stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen
the doctor twice, and had walked the deck against fatigue till he
was overmastered and had fallen where we found him.
Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I hurried off to
seek the doctor.
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