Billy arose and moving softly to the stove picked up the harmless milk snake, squirming and protesting, from the warm floor. O'Dule watched him with fascinated eyes. The big cat had risen and with back fur and tail afluff spit vindictively as Billy passed out through the door.,
"That is no answer, sir," she cried. "You have basely and cruelly stolen me from my home. I command you to return me to my father! Is this your gratitude for his goodness to you and the affectionate regard he has for Sir William Lawrence, who will be more shocked than even Captain Acton by your unnatural, ignoble, treacherous conduct? Home cannot be far, the ship has not sailed many miles. Return me at once, sir! Ships must be in sight, any one of which will put me ashore. If you detain me, if you carry me I know not where in the hope of my marrying you, you will drive me mad, as I nearly am mad now," and when she spoke these words, she delivered a wild, shrieking laugh, baring her teeth by such strenuous elongation of her lips as left them ashen; and the tragic quality of that ringing dreadful laugh was heightened by the absence of the faintest stroke of merriment in her features.,
The Aurora's boat was swept alongside the brig, and Captain Acton and the Admiral clambered over the side up a short flight of steps, and in an instant Lucy was clasped in the devouring embrace of her father. Such an old-world scene taxes the highest gifts of the pen or the brush. This Louisa Ann was about fifty years old; she was nearly as broad as she was long. Her fore-mast was stepped far in the bows; her decks were stained and grimy; the paint had faded out of the inside of her bulwarks. Her sails were patched and so dingy that they might have been coloured as a smack's. Her rusty sides were lined with yawning seams amid which three little circular windows were merged with no accentuation from the dirt-shrouded glass which prevented the sea from entering the blistered, worn, mani-coloured hull. Her sailors looked as though[Pg 359] they were shipwrecked: long-haired, bearded, sallow, in clothes considerably tattered, in aspect melancholy and dejected with lack of nourishment, dullness of sailing and ceaseless motion: for here was the tub wallowing like a buoy in a popple upon a smooth sea, and the frightful weather she would make off Cape Horn or in a gale of wind the imagination of a sailor could readily picture by witnessing her motions now..
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