Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/295

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THE GREYHOUND STEPS FORTH
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great changes had to take place. Bulwarks had to be built up around her, as befitted a fighting craft. In her stern a cabin had to be constructed, and in doing this the Captain insisted that the rudder-stock be lengthened, so that while handling the tiller he should be able to stand grandiosely exalted on that little upper deck of the cabin roof.

These additions, it must be explained, gave to the Greyhound the ponderous stateliness of a Spanish galleon. The pirates later tried to do away with this impression of heaviness by the angle at which they set up the Greyhound's masts. But rake these two masts as devilishly and debonairly as they could, the old-time purveyor of brick and sand, naturally enough, refused to shake off her look of phlegmatic and even sullen ponderosity.

And when her first sailing test came about, she not only refused most stubbornly to respond to the tiller, but even in the fiercest gale of wind loomed slowly and solemnly onward, with the funereal stateliness of a coal barge. Still not despairing, her crew went lustily to work and rigged her up with oars, four on a side, somewhat after the fashion of