le-head, followed by
Mr. Mellaire, while I waited by the foremast, clinging tight, and endured
another ducking. Through the emergencies I could see the pencil of
light, appearing and disappearing, darting here and there. Several
minutes later the mates were back with me.

"Half our head-gear's carried away," Mr. Pike told me. "We must have run
into something."

"I felt a jar, right after you' went below, sir, last time," said Mr.
Mellaire. "Only I thought it was a thump of sea."

"So did I feel it," the mate agreed. "I was just taking off my boots. I
thought it was a sea. But where are the three devils?"

"Broaching the cask," the second mate suggested.

We made the forecastle-head, descended the iron ladder, and went for'ard,
inside, underneath, out of the wind and sea. There lay the cask,
securely lashed. The size of the barnacles on it was astonishing. They
were as large as apples and inches deep. A down-fling of bow brought a
foot of water about our boots; and as the bow lifted and the water
drained away, it drew out from the shell-crusted cask streamers of
seaweed a foot or so in length.

Led by Mr. Pike and watching our chance between seas, we searched the
deck and rails between the forecastle-head and the for'ard-house and
found no devils. The mate stepped into the forecastle doorway, and his
light-stick cut like a dagger through the dim illumination of the murky
sea-lamp. And we saw the devils. Nosey Murphy had been right. There
were three of them.

Let me give the picture: A drenched and freezing room of rusty, paint-
scabbed iron, low-roofed, double-tiered with bunks, reeking with the
filth of thirty men, despite the washing of the sea. In a top bunk, on
his side, in sea-boots and oilskins, staring steadily with blue, bitter
eyes, Andy Fay; on the table, pulling at a pipe, with hanging legs
dragged this way and that by the churn of water, Mulligan Jacobs,
solemnly regarding three men, sea-booted and bloody, who stand side by
side, of a height and not duly tall, swaying in unison to the
_Elsinore's_ down-flinging and up-lifting.

But such men! I know my East Side and my East End, and I am accustomed
to the faces of all the ruck of races, yet with these three men I was at
fault. The Mediterranean had surely never bred such a breed; nor had
Scandinavia. They were not blonds. They were not brunettes. Nor were
they of the Brown, or Black, or Yellow. Their skin was white under a
bronz