The vessel was wallowing deep in a trough at the time. He caught the fore-mast chains with both hands and hung trailing up to the knees in bubbling brine. Something bumped his knee. It was Anson; his leer seemed more pronounced than ever; then he went out of sight. Men in the channels gripped Ortho’s wrists and hoisted him clear. He lay where they threw him, panting and shivering, water dribbling from his clothes to the deck.
Aft on the poop a couple of men, officers evidently, were staring at the _Gamecock_ drifting astern, bottom up. They did not consider her worth the trouble of going after. A negro gave Ortho a kick with his bare foot, handed him a bowl of hot gruel and a crust of bread. Ortho gulped these and then dragged himself to his feet, leaned against the main-jeers and took stock of his surroundings.
It was quite a small vessel, rigged in a bastard fashion he had never seen before, square on the main mast, exaggerated lugs on the fore and mizzen. She had low sharp entry, but was built up aft with quarter-deck and poop; she was armed like a frigate and swarming with men.
Ortho could not think where she housed them all—and such men, brown, yellow, white and black, with and without beards. Some wore pointed red caps, some wisps of dirty linen wound about their scalps, and others were bare-headed and shorn to the skin but for a lock of oily hair. They wore loose garments of many colors, chocolate, saffron, salmon and blue, but the majority were of a soiled white. They drew these close about their lean bodies and squatted, bare toes protruding, under the break of the quarter-deck, in the lee of scuttle butts, boats, masts—anywhere out of the wind. They paid no attention to him whatever, but chatted and spat and laughed, their teeth gleaming white in their dark faces, for all the world like a tribe of squatting baboons. One of them produced a crude two-stringed guitar and sang a melancholy dirge to the accompaniment of creaking blocks and hissing bow-wave. The sunset was but a chink of yellow light between leaden cloud and leaden sea.
There was a flash away in the dusk to port followed by the slam of a gun.
A gigantic old man came to the quarter-deck rail and bellowed across the decks. Ortho thought he looked like the pictures of Biblical patriarchs—Moses, for instance—with his long white beard and mantle blowing in the wind.