The Captain Was Walking The Quarter-Deck, Smoking His
Morning Cigar, And F - - - Went As Far As The Break Of The Deck, And There
Waited For Him To Notice Him.
The captain took two or three turns,
and then walking directly up to him, surveyed him from head to
Foot,
and lifting up his forefinger, said a word or two, in a tone too low
for us to hear, but which had a magical effect upon poor F - - -.
He walked forward, sprang into the forecastle, and in a moment more
made his appearance in his common clothes, and went quietly to work again.
What the captain said to him, we never could get him to tell, but it
certainly changed him outwardly and inwardly in a most surprising manner.
CHAPTER XIV
SANTA BARBARA - HIDE-DROGHING - HARBOR DUTIES - DISCONTENT - SAN PEDRO
After a few days, finding the trade beginning to slacken, we
hove our anchor up, set our topsails, ran the stars and stripes
up to the peak, fired a gun, which was returned from the Presidio,
and left the little town astern, running out of the bay, and
bearing down the coast again, for Santa Barbara. As we were now
going to leeward, we had a fair wind and a plenty of it. After
doubling Point Pinos, we bore up, set studding-sails alow and aloft,
and were walking off at the rate of eight or nine knots, promising
to traverse in twenty-four hours the distance which we were nearly
three weeks in traversing on the passage up. We passed Point
Conception at a flying rate, the wind blowing so that it would have
seemed half a gale to us, if we had been going the other way and
close hauled. As we drew near the islands off Santa Barbara, it
died away a little but we came-to at our old anchoring-ground in
less than thirty hours from the time of leaving Monterey.
Here everything was pretty much as we left it - the large bay without
a vessel in it; the surf roaring and rolling in upon the beach;
the white mission; the dark town and the high, treeless mountains.
Here, too, we had our south-easter tacks aboard again, - slip-ropes,
buoy-ropes, sails furled with reefs in them, and rope-yarns for gaskets.
We lay here about a fortnight, employed in landing goods and taking
off hides, occasionally, when the surf was not high; but there did
not appear to be one-half the business doing here that there was
in Monterey. In fact, so far as we were concerned, the town might
almost as well have been in the middle of the Cordilleras. We lay
at a distance of three miles from the beach, and the town was nearly
a mile farther; so that we saw little or nothing of it. Occasionally
we landed a few goods, which were taken away by Indians in large,
clumsy ox-carts, with the yoke on the ox's neck instead of under it,
and with small solid wheels.
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