The new moon was due on the fifth day after they struck. On the fourth, another bottle of whiskey appeared in the fo'c's'le, and two men were drunk. Dan'l had the men whipped.... Faith made no objection to this; but she watched the faces of the others.... Watched the officers, and Brander in particular, and Mauger.... Brander, since that morning of Noll's death, had avoided her more strictly.... He and Dan'l did not speak, save when they must. She saw the man was keeping a guard upon himself; and she puzzled over this. She could not know that Brander was afire with joy at the new hope that was awakening in him; afire with a vision of her.... He fought against this, held himself in check; and she saw only that he was morose and still and that he avoided her eye....
The high tides of the new moon failed to float them; and there was growling forward. Dan'l said, openly, that he believed they would never go free. The men heard; and the superstitions of the sea began to play about the fo'c's'le. There was unrest; the men felt approaching the possible liberation from ship's discipline when they abandoned the Sally. They remembered the ambergris beneath the cabin. There was a fortune.... They could take no oil with them; but they could take that when the time should come to leave the ship. Plenty of room in one boat for it and half a dozen men besides.... They fretted at the waiting, called it hopeless, as Dan'l did.... The barrier between officers and men was somewhat lowered; more than one of the men spoke to Brander of the ambergris. Did he claim it for his own?...
Faith, one day, heard a man talking to Brander amidships; she caught only a word or two. One of these words was "'Gris." She saw that the man was asking Brander a question; she saw that on Brander's answer, the man grinned with greed in his eyes, and turned away to whisper to two of his fellows....
She wondered what Brander had said to him, why Brander had not silenced the man. And she watched Brander the closer, her heart sickening with a fear she would not name....
They had landed before this and explored their island.... Low and flat and no more than a mile or two in extent, it had fruit a-plenty, and a spring of good water.... But none dwelt anywhere upon it. It soon palled upon them; they stuck by the ship; and the days held clear and fine and the nights were warm, and the crescent moon above them flattened, night by night, till it was no longer a crescent, but half a circle of silver radiance that touched the beach and the trees and the sea with magic fingers....
That night, with the fall tides still a week away, Roy Kilcup came into the waist and looked aft. There was no officer in sight at the moment save old Tichel, and Roy hailed him softly.... Tichel went forward to where the boy stood; they whispered together. Then Tichel went with Roy toward the fo'c's'le....
Faith was in her cabin; Dan'l was in the main cabin; and Willis and Brander were playing cribbage near him when the outcry forward roused them. A man yelled.... They were on deck in tumbling haste; and Faith was at their heels....
Came Tichel, dragging Mauger by the collar. His right hand gripped Mauger; his left held a bottle. He shook the one-eyed man till Mauger's teeth rattled; and he brandished the bottle. "Caught the pig," he cried furiously. "Here he is. With this hid under his blanket...."
Mauger protested: "I never put it there...." Tichel cuffed him into silence. Dan'l asked sharply:
"What's that, Mr. Tichel?"