Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing
in his hoisted quarter-deck, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the
stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow.
He was a darkly-tanned, burly, goodnatured, fine-looking man, of sixty
or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him
in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket
streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a huzzar's surcoat.
"Hast seen the White Whale!"
"See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,
he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden
head like a mallet.
"Man my boat!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars
near him--"Stand by to lower!"
In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft,
he and his crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside
of the stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself.
In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since
the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any
vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious
and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod,
and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at
a moment's warning.
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