"Men," said Captain North, quietly, "Mr. Gleazen has asked me to call you together. There are certain things that he wishes to tell you."
As the grizzled old mariner stepped back, Cornelius Gleazen advanced.
His beaver, donned for the occasion, was tilted over his eye as of old; his diamonds flashed from finger and throat; he puffed great clouds of smoke from his ever-present cigar.
"Lads," he cried in that voice which seemed always so fine and hearty and honest, "lads, that there's no ordinary purpose in this voyage, all of you, I make no doubt, have heard. Well, lads, you're right about that. It is no ordinary purpose that has brought us all the way from Boston. You've done good work for us so far, and if you keep up the good work until the end of the voyage has brought us home again to New England, we ain't going to forget you, lads. No, sir! Not me and Mr. Matterson and Mr. O'Hara—oh, yes, and Mr. Upham! We ain't going to forget you."
Reflectively he knocked the ash from his cigar. Leaning over the rail, he said, as if taking all the men into his confidence, "All you've got to do now, lads, is stand by. Captain North will take the brig to sea for one week. There's a reason for that, lads, a good reason. At the end of the week he will bring the brig up off the mouth of the river, and some fine morning you'll wake up and find us back again.
"Meanwhile, lads, we're going to make up a little party to go exploring. Me and Mr. Matterson, Mr. O'Hara, Mr. Upham, and Pedro and Sanchez are going. And we are going to take John Laughlin with us, too. It's going to be a hard trip, lads, and you'll none of you be sorry to miss it. Now, then, lay to and load this gear into the boat. Be faithful to your work, and you'll be glad when you see what we're going to do for you."
As he turned away, proud of his eloquence, there was a low rumble of voices.
I looked first at Gleazen and Matterson and O'Hara; then I looked at poor Seth Upham, once as proud and arrogant as any of them. Remembering how in little ways he had been kind to me,—how, since my mother died, his dry, hard affection had gone out to me, as if in spite of him,—I pitied the man from the bottom of my heart. Surely, I thought, he must not go alone into the wilds of Africa with such men as were to make up Gleazen's party.
No one had spoken, except in undertones, since Gleazen; some one, I thought, must speak promptly and firmly.
For a moment, as I looked at the hard faces of the men whom I must oppose, my courage forsook me utterly; then the new confidence that had been growing within me once more gave me command of myself. Whatever should come of my effort, I was determined that my mother's brother should have at least one honest man beside him. To reason out all this had taken me the merest fraction of the time that it takes to read it.