lessed water?

Then something cold, slimy, horrible, ran over his face, and the
loathful thrill he felt shocked him into reality.

The desert vanished. He tried to move and sat up. He heard a frenzied
squeaking, and a light scampering on wood, and he knew that a rat had
run over his body.

All the sensations of consciousness assailed him abruptly. He heard
the rats, and a deep rumble near by; he saw dimly in the darkness; he
smelled of mingled odors of provisions; he felt thirst. Though he was
out of the desert, he was still consumed with thirst.

He sat quietly for a moment while his confused thoughts gradually
arrayed themselves in orderly fashion. He knew where he was
instantly--the jumble of casks, and kegs, and boxes, that surrounded
him, and which he could dimly perceive in the gloom, and the smell,
told him he was in the ship's lazaret. How he came to be there was as
yet concealed behind a haze that clouded his memory.

Next, he became aware that something was the matter with his arms.
They ached cruelly. After a moment's experimenting and reflection the
truth came to him with shocking force--his arms were drawn behind him,
and his wrists were handcuffed together. The shock of that discovery
dissipated the fog over his mind. He began to remember.

But while his wits groped, he was sharply conscious of his thirst. It
blazed. His tongue felt like a piece of swollen leather. He felt
pain. His throat was throbbing with pain. Water! Water was the
pressing need, the most important thing in existence.

He tried to mouth his desire, to speak it aloud, and a weak and painful
gurgle struggled outward from his throat.

There was a stir close by him, and a voice spoke up. Martin was then
aware that the deep rumble he had been listening to was the sound of a
man swearing deeply and softly. The man now spoke to him.

"Ow, lad, is that you? 'Ave you come to, Martin!"

Martin peered toward the voice, and saw a few feet ahead of him, beyond
a circular stanchion, the shadowy outline of a man. He tried to speak,
to say, "Bosun! Bosun!" But his misused throat and parched tongue
refused to form the words. And with the other's voice came memory,
complete and terrible. The past was arrayed before his mind's eye with
a lightning flash of recollection. The dreadful present was clear to
him in all its bitter truth.

He remembered the trip to the deck in search of Little Billy; the
black, evil night, an