"What the de'il's that? Guide us, it's a man! Some puir body the waur o'
his drink, ah'm thinkin'. Haud up, maister! Losh! it's the cauptain," he
cried, as with the not very efficient aid of his friend he tried to
raise the prostrate man. But there was more than drink the matter here.
"There's bluid on him!" cried one who had been vainly essaying to clap a
battered hat on to the head of the form that lay unconscious in the mud.
A hard task it was presently, when his senses began to return, to get
the wounded sailor unsteadily on his legs; a harder to get him home. The
captain could give but a poor account of how he came to be lying there;
thickly and indistinctly he tried to explain that he had laid a course
for his own moorings, and had been keeping a bright look-out, when
suddenly he had been brought up all standing, and he thought he must
have run bows on into some other craft, for he remembered no more than
getting a crack over his figurehead. Morning was treading on the heels
of night before Hislop and Wallace had got the damaged man home and had
left him safely stowed in bed, and themselves were peacefully snoring,
unconscious of coming trouble.
A day or two passed quietly, and the damaged man already was little the
worse of his adventure.
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