Another man
appeared to be sleeping face downwards on the sort of longitudinal bridge
these big canoes have in the waist. But it was presently apparent, from
the sway of her rudder and the way she drifted into the course of the
gunboat, that something was out of order with her. Gerilleau surveyed her
through a field-glass, and became interested in the queer darkness of the
face of the sitting man, a red-faced man he seemed, without a nose--
crouching he was rather than sitting, and the longer the captain looked
the less he liked to look at him, and the less able he was to take his
glasses away.
But he did so at last, and went a little way to call up Holroyd. Then he
went back to hail the cuberta. He ailed her again, and so she drove past
him. _Santa Rosa_ stood out clearly as her name.
As she came by and into the wake of the monitor, she pitched a little, and
suddenly the figure of the crouching an collapsed as though all its joints
had given way. His hat fell off, his head was not nice to look at, and his
body flopped lax and rolled out of sight behind the bulwarks.
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