“And many more.” Notice that! It is an appeal to that gaping sailmaker, those wide-eyed sleepers, those staring men in the rigging. Here am I, it says, your spokesman, telling the captain now just what we have all been saying about him and the way we all feel; stick by me; somebody up there in the yards please drop a block on his head.
Gangs, being untrained and undirected, are necessarily uncertain and do not engage their opportunity. A brisk demonstration of sympathy might have saved the gunner; the captain was only one man.
The ship rocked, the wind blew sluggish from Malabar, a cord smacked thinly against the spars and the moment passed.
“Have I ruined you, ye dog?” replied his formidable opponent. “Take that!”
Kidd grabbed a heavy wooden bucket, bound with iron hoops, probably the one holding the water with which the gunner wet his stone, and smote Moore upon the head.
Sails sank his needle back in the canvas, the sleepers turned over on their sides, the men aloft looked a moment solemnly at each other, and the wooden bucket, bound with iron hoops, rolled redly to the scuppers.
There was an opening for a gunner aboard the ship Adventure.
Malabar, that beautiful and fertile strip of the Indian coast which fronts the Arabian Sea for some hundred and fifty miles, was a sort of way station for Kidd as he worked the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. He ran in and out of this region according to his need of victualing or repairing the now unsatisfactory Adventure.
He was not what one would call exactly welcome there. His coming meant a disturbance in the local villages and the liberation upon them of an undisciplined and roguish company. His crew and the natives not occasionally fell out. Very likely the sailors were the beginners of the trouble,—so their general make-up of character would suggest. Gunner Moore’s death was not the only violence of the Adventure’s hours at Malabar.
There was, for instance, the matter of the ship’s cooper. That artisan got among the natives and never came back to the ship. It was on him the townsfolk avenged themselves in an undetermined quarrel with the pirates of which the cooper’s death was an episode. Knowing Kidd as we do, it is not astonishing that he visited his wrath upon the natives in vindicating the life even of a ship’s cooper. He swarmed his men ashore, burned down the dwellings of the people and, catching one of the inhabitants, ordered him, with crude formality, shot.