The St. Pierre shipped a sea with a strain like to tear her asunder, and waters went sizzling through lee scuppers above with the hiss of a cataract. M. Radisson inverts a sand-glass and watches the sand trickle through till the last grain drops. Then he turns to us.
Two or three faces had gone white as the driving spray, but never a man opened his lips to counsel return.
"Gentlemen," says M. Radisson, with the fires agleam in his deep-set eyes, "am I to understand that every one here is for going forward at any risk?"
"Aye—aye, sir!" burst like a clarion from our circle.
Pierre Radisson smiled quietly.
"'Tis as well," says he, "for I bade the coward stand up so that I could run him through to the hilt," and he clanked the sword back to its scabbard.
"As I said before," he went on, "the crew on my kinsman's ship have mutinied. There's another trifle to keep under your caps, gentlemen—the mutineers have been running up pirate signals to the crew of this ship——"
"Pirate signals!" interrupts La Chesnaye, whose temper was ever crackling off like grains of gunpowder. "May I ask, sir, how you know the pirate signals?"
M. de Radisson's face was a study in masks.
"You may ask, La Chesnaye," says he, rubbing his chin with a wrinkling smile, "you may ask, but I'm hanged if I answer!"