Yelling these tidings, the men scampered back to the bridge-deck, where, saving for the few driven off to set the mizzen trysail, all the rest of the steamer’s complement were collected.
“She’s settling by the head! It’s making a clean breach over her this minute! She’ll be down with us if we don’t look quick!”
Then another voice cried: “Let the foul old tramp go to hell by herself. She shan’t drown me, for one, while she’s got a boat that’ll swim. Come along, boys!” Whereupon a mixed half-dozen of deck-hands and firemen made a rush for the foot of the upper bridge ladder.
At the head of that ladder stood Captain Kettle, grinning like a tortured fiend. The crew were acting precisely as it had been planned that they should act. They were doing what a laboriously-formed plot had compelled them to do. But at that moment the little captain’s weakness for battle nearly got the better of him, and was within an ace of making him attempt to upset the entire apple-cart. The idea of his men—the despised all-nation rabble, whom he had brow-beaten into subjection all across the broad Atlantic—taking the initiative into their own hands now, was too much for him to swallow in a single dose. Sooner than submit, he would have ruined everything ten times over. Consequently he drew on the first man who advanced up the ladder, and his eyes lit up with the steady, passionless glare of slaughter.
The fellow was brave enough—desperate, too, as a man could be—but upon certain death he hesitated to advance. Indeed, when Kettle, coming down the ladder himself, thrust him furiously back with a black pistol muzzle, he retreated to the bridge-deck, as did those who were with him.
But the other men of that worthy crew had no mind to be tyrannized over any longer when the steamer was momentarily settling down under their feet, and drowning was an immediate question. By the funnel stays and by one another’s backs they swarmed on to the top of the fiddley, and thence gaining the boat platforms, set about cutting adrift the grimy awnings with their knives, and clearing away the tackles and falls. They shipped rudders and fitted the plugs, and one or two, with more forethought than their frightened fellows, shouldered the boats’ water-breakers and took them aft to where the condenser-tap gave upon the lower deck.
Kettle did not interfere. He had held the bridge-deck ladders against all comers, and in some cranky way felt that his honor was unsmirched. But he gave no help, no hint, no further order, and surveyed the scene with folded arms and a sour, thin smile. Patrick Onslow, being moved by a different set of feelings, acted more humanely.
“Take time, men,” he sung out coolly, “if you will be cowards and leave the ship. I don’t think she’ll sink—at any rate not yet.”
The men had knocked away the chocks, hoisted the boats, and swung the davits outboard.
“Keep your heads, you trembling idiots! Pass your painters forward before you begin to lower, and don’t lower till you’ve victualled the boats. You’ve at least a hundred-and-fifty mile run before you can make Charlotte Harbor, which is your best port with this wind blowing; and as like as not you’ll miss your road when you get inshore among the keys and reefs, and be a week getting there.”