“Bolt like a rat with the first alarm. He’d show pluck if he was paid for it, would my third mate; but not being paid, he’ll take the best care possible of his own ugly hide. He isn’t a fellow who’d ever like a tight corner for its own sake. There’s not an atom of the sportsman about him.”
Onslow laughed. “You’re just the other way, Captain.”
Kettle’s face clouded. “It’s a fact,” he said. “Times I am that way—curse my cantankerous luck.”
“Your weakness in that direction came in handily for me yesterday.”
“You’re right, Mr. Onslow, right all through. By George, I’d half a mind to chip in with these rogues and grab what I could. It was a tempting chance, and it would have been a deal more profitable to me than what I’m in for now. As for the honesty of the thing, there wasn’t a pin to choose between it and this racket of yours and Mr. Shelf’s. But it was that Dutchman’s gall that put me off. If he’d held his silly jaw, and if those other bladder-heads had let me understand I was to hold the pistol-hand over them, well, the Port Edes would have coral rock spouting through her bottom plates this minute, and I’d be a man owning a matter of three to five thousand pounds. That’s putting it straight.”
“So,” said Onslow, “I suppose I have to thank the said Dutchman for carrying a sound windpipe this minute?”
“No,” replied Kettle thoughtfully, “I don’t think it. I fancy you’d have behaved reasonable over the new deal, and then I’d have stood by you. Especially,” he added slowly, as though from after-thought, “especially if those dogs thought that you’d have been safer out of the way. What,” he asked with a sudden frown, as though the subject annoyed him—“what have you been doing with yourself this afternoon?”
“Physicking a sick fireman principally. The stokehold temperature was 105 degrees, and as he amused himself drinking condensed water by the quart together, the somewhat natural consequence was cramp in the stomach. They sent him up by the ash-lift, and your steward dosed him with chlorodyne and laudanum, and tincture of rhubarb. The result wasn’t encouraging.”