“Ho!” thinks I. “What does this mean?”
I rushed out in my shirt and stockings to the under deck and from there up the hatchway. The wind hit me full in the face, and I could see the lights of town dropping astern.
I stuck my head up over the hatchway; there was Every conning the ship.
“Breakers ahead!” thought I. “Yaw away, old Bill May, afore you strike.”
Every saw me at that minute.
“You, May,” he roared, nasty, “I believe you do not love this way; get down to your cabin.”
But see what the king’s evidence said about me. One Creagh, a dirty wretch, and now a prisoner right in this gaol for treason with Captain Vaughan, and one time aboard the Charles the Second, witnessed that at this going-off of the ship, “I met with William May, the prisoner at the bar. ‘What do you do here?’ says he. I made him no answer but went down to my cabin, and May swore at me and said, ‘You deserve to be shot through the head,’ and he held a pistol at my head.”
Can you imagine a man who has fought for his king and country being a party to the crime of stealing the ship of a fellow subject? Not only that. The ship’s carpenter was a ringleader with Mr. Every in this insurrection, and Creagh—may he be eaten alive with weevils—swore the carpenter said in his hearing—
“Old May I can trust with anything; he is a true cock of the old game and an old sportsman.”
Was ever such a farrago told in a king’s court?