Old Paterson bowed and scraped politely. “Cap’n,” he began, with the habitually humble voice before authority, “we’re on short allowance. We hope your honor ain’t agoin’ home without proper victuals aboard.”
His supporters growled their amen. The captain, hardly holding himself in from hurling a chair, a bottle, a tackle block or anything handy at the presumptuous faces before him, rose up and frigidly replied that there was a steward aboard who had the care of the provisions and all complaints would be properly redressed. The tarry gang tumbled back to their proper sphere, leaving the captain in a muddle of embarrassment and suspicion,—embarrassment for his fractured dignity, suspicion because the intrusion indicated a perhaps germinating rebellion.
Old Paterson leered at his guard of honor. “As we eat, so shall we work.”
The merchants in polite course quitted the ship, and the captain, without commenting on the incident of the afternoon, ordered the anchor up and the sails shaken out. They were starting, and there was not a square meal for one, let alone twenty-four men aboard. Short—shorter—shortest allowance all the way home.
The crew lagged at their work; particularly old Paterson, who crawled into the shrouds so sluggardly that the captain marked him, and in round sea terms demanded why he did not get to unfurling the sails more seamanlike. Old Paterson turned like an aged rattlesnake.
“As we eat, so shall we work.”
The captain caught the mutter, and so did John Gow, the second mate. The captain prudently did nothing about it; the second mate grinned and gazed innocently out at the greenish sea.
II
Apprehension—almost premonition—dropped heavily upon the skipper as the day marched to a gray and windy evening. The complaining deputation that had assaulted his quarter-deck in the early afternoon, the open grumbling of old Paterson, and above all, no doubt, a something in the demeanor of the men, which an experienced master might read like the signs of the sky, foreboded the brewing of violence.
He and his mate were standing on the quarter-deck, where, in the dusk, two or three men passed and repassed them on the business of the ship. The mate himself felt the coming of a worse storm than that of wind and wave, and when the captain, bracing himself sufficiently to confess his fears and suggest that small arms should be gathered and placed in his cabin “in case anything should happen”, his chief officer, glad to air his secret anxiety, at once set about the business.