An islander uttered a shrill catcall just outside the galley and thrust his head and half his naked body in the door. He vanished again almost instantly, but Frank jumped and upset the kettle. "Yass, sah, you creepy ol' sarpint," he gasped. "Yass, sah, we's sottin' on a bar'l of gunpowder."
I am convinced, as I look back on that night from the pinnacle of more than half a century, that not one man in ten thousand has ever spent one like it. Allied with a horde whose language we could not speak, we had boarded our own ship and now—mutineers, pirates, or loyal mariners, according to your point of view—we shared her possession with a mob of howling heathens whose goodwill depended on the whim of the moment, and who might at any minute, by slaughtering us out of hand, get for their own godless purposes the ship and all that was in her.
The cook cautiously fingered the keen edge of his cleaver as we looked out and saw that dawn was brightening in the east.
"Dat Falk, he say he gwine git us yet," the cook muttered. "Maybe so—maybe not. Maybe we ain't gwine last as long as dat."
"All hands aft!"
Frank and I looked at each other. The galley was as safe and comfortable as any place aboard ship and we were reluctant to leave it.
"All hands aft!" came the call again.
"Ah reckon," Frank said thoughtfully, "me and you better be gwine. When
Mistah Hamlin he holler like dat, he want us."
Light had come with amazing swiftness, and already we could see the deck from stem to stern without help of the torches, which still flamed and sent thin streamers of smoke drifting into the mist.
As we emerged from the galley, I noticed that the after-hatch was half open. That in itself did not surprise me; stranger things than that had come to pass in the last hour or two; but when some one cautiously emerged from the hold, with a quick, sly glance at those on the quarter-deck, I'll confess that I was surprised. It was the man from Boston.