“They will not be needed, Mr. Bo’sen,” he says. “Pipe the crew for’ard!”
The keen whistle sings; the mutinous ones scuttle forward, like fowls that hear the high scream of some menacing hawk..
It is two bells in the evening; the port watch, in charge of the knife-wounded Mr. Sands, has the deck. The dead Mungo, tight-clouted in a hammock, lies stretched on a grating, ready for burial.
Captain Jack Paul comes up from his cabin. In his hand he carries a prayer-book. Also those two pistols are still in his belt.
“Turn out the watch below!” is the word.
The crew makes a silent half-circle about the dead Mungo. That mutinous sullenness, recently the defiant expression of their faces, is supplanted by a deprecatory look, composite of apology and fear. It is as though they would convince Captain Jack Paul of their tame and sheep-like frame of thought. The fate of Mungo has instructed them; for one and all they are of that criminal, coward brood, best convinced by a club and with whom death is the only conclusive argument. As they stand uncovered about the rigid one in the clouted hammock, they realize in full the villainy of mutiny, and abandon that ship-rebellion which has been forecastle talk and plan since ever the Plymouth lights went out astern.
Captain Jack Paul reads a prayer, and the dead Mungo is surrendered to the deep. As the body goes splashing into the sea, Captain Jack Paul turns on the subdued ones.
“Let me tell you this, my men!” says he. His tones have a cold, threatening ring, like the clink of iron on arctic ice. “The first of you who so much as lifts an eyebrow in refusal of an order shall go the same voyage as the black. And so I tell you!”
Captain Jack Paul brings the Grantully Castle into Tobago, crew as it might be a crew of lambs. Once his anchors are down, he signals for the port admiral. Within half an hour the gig of that dignitary is alongside.
The Honorable Simpson, Judge Surrogate of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Tobago, with the Honorable Young, Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, to give him countenance, opens court in the after cabins of the Grantully Castle. The crew are examined, man after man. They say little, lest they themselves be caught in some law net, and landed high and dry in the Tobago jail. First Officer Sands shows his wound and tells his story.