One night the Foundling was off the southern coast of Florida, and running at half-speed towards the shore. The captain was on the bridge. "Four flashes at of one minute," he said to himself, gazing towards the beach. Suddenly a yellow eye opened in the black face of the night, and looked at the Foundling and closed again. The captain studied his watch and the shore. Three times more the eye opened and looked at the Foundling and closed again. The captain called to the vague figures on the deck below him. "Answer it." The flash of a light from the bow of the steamer displayed for a moment in golden colour the of the inriding waves.
The Foundling lay to and waited. The long rolled her , and her two stub masts reaching into the darkness swung with the solemnity of a . When the ship had left Boston she had been as encrusted with ice as a Dakota stage-driver's beard, but now the gentle wind of Florida softly swayed the lock on the forehead of the coatless Flanagan, and he lit a new cigar without troubling to make a shield of his hands.
Finally a dark boat came plashing over the waves. As it came very near, the captain leaned forward and perceived that the men in her rowed like seamstresses, and at the same time a voice hailed him in bad English. "It's a dead sure connection," said he to himself.
At sea, to load two hundred thousand rounds of rifle , seven hundred and fifty rifles, two rapid-fire field guns with a hundred shells, forty bundles of machetes, and a hundred pounds of , from yawls, and by men who are not born , and in a heavy ground , and with the searchlight of a United States cruiser sometimes flashing like lightning in the sky to the southward, is no business for a Sunday-school class. When at last the Foundling was steaming for the open over the grey sea at dawn, there was not a man of the forty come aboard from the Florida shore, nor of the fifteen sailed from Boston, who was not glad, with his hair matted to his forehead with sweat, smiling at the broad wake of the Foundling and the dim on the horizon which was Florida.
But there is a point of the compass in these waters men call the north-east. When the strong winds come from that direction they kick up a that is not good for a Foundling stuffed with coals and war-stores. In the which came, this ship was no more than a drunken soldier.
The Cuban leader, standing on the bridge with the captain, was presently informed that of his men, thirty-nine out of a possible thirty-nine were sea-sick. And in truth they were sea-sick. There are degrees in this complaint, but that matter was between them. They were all sick to the limits. They the deck in every of human , and when the Foundling ducked and water came down from the bows, they let it . They were satisfied if they could keep their heads clear of the wash; and if they could not keep their heads clear of the wash, they didn't care. Presently the Foundling swung her course to the south-east, and the waves pounded her broadside. The were all ordered below decks, and there they howled and measured their one against another. All day the Foundling plopped and floundered over a blazing bright meadow of an ocean whereon the white was like flowers.
The captain on the bridge and studied the bare horizon. "Hell!" said he to himself, and the word was more in than in indignation or sorrow. "Thirty-nine sea-sick passengers, the mate with a broken arm, a stoker with a broken , the cook with a pair of scalded legs, and an engine likely to be taken with all the............