The voices moved away and Demaine, while he breathed somewhat more freely, was back again in his former doubt and terror. It grew to be broad day; he heard the rattling of chains; the presence of men upon every hand made him but the more determined to remain in his hiding-place until he could approach the Captain in some more convenient manner than through the medium of the unfeeling and ill-educated North Countrymen who seemed to compose the crew. He felt the great ship swinging, he could see the patch of cloud in the sky of which he had a glimpse, turning as she turned, he felt the slight throb of her engines; she was passing down the dock, she was out of the gate--she was almost in the river, when, to his horror ... the coil of rope which had been his bulwark against an unfeeling world, _began slowly to uncoil at the top_, with the motion of some great and wicked snake that was making for its harmless prey. Had George Mulross attained that acquaintance with seafaring terms which is proper to an administrator of this sea-girt isle (and especially to a Warden of the Court of Dowry), he would have known that the rapidly disappearing coil before him was being used as a warping rope, and he would have connected the steady clank of the donkey engine which accompanied its disappearance with the absorption of fathom after fathom of what had been kindly shelter. But even had he known these things it is doubtful whether they would have interested him at the moment. He crouched lower and lower as the coil diminished, occupying the smallest space compatible with keeping his legs tucked away behind what was left of the cable: but the Gods were deaf that morning to all prayers. The last eighteen inches of the coil’s height were reached and still the pitiless donkey engine clanked, and still the lengths went slithering away, until at last his back appeared above the element it lived in,--the unmistakable back of a human being, clothed in a ragged green-black coat. To the trained and piercing eye of sailor-men the object was unmistakable, and like two cats upon one mouse his acquaintances of an hour before pounced upon his trembling form: the sceptical one now converted and protesting that he had been convinced from the first of the stowaway’s presence, the other in cruel triumph dragging him along the deck and threatening him with such consequences as not even the peculiar idiom of the North Country could completely veil. With such energy as remained to him, George sprang up at the first opportunity they gave him. He had the sense not to run upon those crowded and confined decks. The button torn off his coat-collar in the scramble showed his bare neck and chest. Masses of grime, tar and dust streaked his face; his hair was most untidy, and his bootless feet were caked in mud. “I want to see the captain,” he said between his gasps.