“Then pick up your feet and let’s go to your hardware shop and start in work.”
“Wait a bit, sor,” said the donkeyman. “There’s things here I don’t understand. Aren’t the lives of us in beastly danger? Didn’t them boats go off because the steamer’s sinking?”
“Do you,” retorted Kettle, “consider me one of those fancy sorts of maniac, who have no wish to survive the loss of a ship? I tell you I should have been drowned eight times already if that had been my lay. No, Mr. Chief, fair fight’s right enough, and I’d stand up to Nick in that, and value my life at less than a rice-mat; but, at other times, you bet, I’m no fool to chuck it away.”
“But,” said the donkeyman, “what gets me’s this. If the blooming steamer’s bottom’s shot out, what’s the fun in messing with it? The Mexican Gulf will circulate through that hole longer than our bilge-pumps will run.”
“You tire me,” said the little man. “Who said she’d her bottom blown out? I tell you this steamer was sunk a few plates above her usual trim—for reasons; and now we are going to pull her up again. See here, do you take the synch from me, Mr. Chief, and ask no more questions, and you’ll get told no lies. It’ll pay you. If you do as you’re bid aboard of me you’ll have sovereigns enough given you to work through the biggest spree that was ever spread out in a seaport town.”
The big donkeyman appreciatively drew the back of a hand across his muzzle.
“Ah, Captain dear,” he said coaxingly, “I’d just like to hear ye mention a figure.”
“Call it two ten-pound notes.”
“Then, be Christopher, I’m yer man for any piece of devilment in the calendar! Come along, Captain dear. ’Tis a melojious little man y’ are, for all they say against yez.”
Meanwhile the steamer was becoming more and more waterlogged with every plunge and roll, and Patrick Onslow feared that his dangerous stratagem for driving away the crew had been carried too far. It seemed to him impossible that they could salvage her now. True, she was brought up to the wind by the after-canvas, and her rollings were not of such sickening strength; but the stern loomed high in the wild night air, and the bows lunged deep into every successive sea that rolled up from the stormy south, taking green water over the forecastle head in masses which scoured anchors and windlass to the naked iron.