Reaching upward, the Ice Pilot warded off the boat and grasped a dangling line that ran over a ship’s rail at the waist. He nudged Eagan and went hand-over-hand upward until one palm hooked the rail, then he turned his head and looked at the boat.
The piano-player, the waiter, and the woman—all three very much alive—were standing on the thwarts. Eagan and the other seamen had found lines up which they were climbing.
Stirling saw the woman draw a bent knife from her breast, toss it overboard, and wring the water from her skirts.
He heard her mocking song as the Whitehall boat merged in the fog, and finally was gone back toward Meigg’s Wharf and the Blubber Room:
"It’s ’rah for th’ grog— Th’ jolly, jolly grog! It’s ’rah for th’ grog an’ tobacco! For you’ve spent all your tin with th’ ladies, drinkin’ gin, An’ across th’ brimy ocean you must wan—der——"
Breathing the invigorating night air, Horace Stirling climbed over the ship’s rail, squared his shoulders, and started toward the poop steps. The consciousness that he had been shanghaied came to him; the sensation was a novel one.
He reached the weather steps. There he paused and swung, facing the after part of the ship. A group of seamen were gathered in the waist. They were receiving the shanghaied sailors who had been brought out in the Whitehall boat.
Stirling gathered in the details of the whaler and his jaw dropped in wonder, while his eyes softened with an appreciative glow. He had never sailed or steamed upon such a ship. She was complete and yachtlike, and her deck house extended fore and aft between the main and mizzenmast. It was such a cabin as one would expect to find on a government revenue cutter. A squat, drab funnel reared from a boat deck, and glowed through the mist like the end of a fat cigar.
Stirling turned and mounted the poop, to face two of the men with whom he had drunk in that tavern near the wharves. One thrust out a hamlike hand. "Remember me?" he said, with a twinkle in his eyes. "I’m Cushner who took the Anderson expedition to the mouth of the Lena River. You were ice pilot of the _Northern Lights_ that season. You gammed us in Bering Strait. Remember?"
Stirling stared up into the big seaman’s face, squinting his eyes in an attempt to recall a vague memory. Slowly the details of the Anderson expedition came back to him.