The men peered about them, and ran aft, poking their noses in pantry and galley and engine-room. Coming back through the alley-way they searched the two mates’ rooms, and found them empty; and going out on the iron fore-deck, found the forecastle deserted also. Then they gathered round that gaping rent where the fore-hatch had been, in curious wonder, examining the crumpled plates which were yellow with new rust, and pointing out to one another the twisted stanchions and splintered débris below. And at this they were engaged when the sun took its final dive beneath the waters of the Mexican gulf to westward, and the tropical darkness snapped down upon them like the shutting of a box.
“Hank,” said the one-eyed man, “this gets me. What in snakes have they been doin’ to this blame’ steamboat, and for why have they gug-gug-gone off and left her?”
“Euclid’s out of my line,” said Hank, oracularly.
“Oh you blank puttyhead,” retorted his friend, “th-th-ink!”
“You tire me. If they aren’t here they aren’t. P’r’aps they’ve gone off and toted the boodle to a cache. P’r’aps it’s left right here aboard, and if it is I guess we shall find it when we want it. What I’m on for now’s grub. I hain’t had a Christian meal for three months, thanks to this new sheriff bustling after us, and I’m about sick of mullet and sweet potatoes. But, please our luck, we’ll raid their store-rooms here and fix up a regular hotel supper for to-night. That’s me. Now, come along, fellers.”
The negroes chuckled and crowed, capering like children, and went off with the tall man towards the galley, and Nutt, after an ineffectual attempt to speak (which threw him into a paroxysm of fury), presently followed them.
The feast was sui generis. They found grease, baking powder, and flour, and made doughnuts; they hotted three tins of Julienne soup; they baked a great mass of salt pork on a bedding of white beans; they made a stew of preserved potatoes, Australian mutton, and pâté de foie gras; and, as a chef d’œuvre, one of the negroes turned out some crisp three-corned tartlets stuffed with strawberry jam. Then Hank, with a lamp in one hand, a cylinder of plates in the other, and a whole armory of knives and forks bristling from his pockets, pattered off to the main cabin to lay the table.
At the doorway he stopped, gaping, and because the instinct of the much-hunted made his right hand slip round to a certain back pocket, the plates went to the ground with a crash. In the swivel-chair at the head of the table was huddled a man, a small man, with a cold cigar bitten tight between his teeth, a man so grimy with coal-dust that Hank couldn’t have sworn whether the short, peaked beard which rested on his chest was black or red or prussian-blue.
“Oh, don’t you trouble to be polite,” said the man in the chair. “I’m mighty glad to see any one who can talk, or use a pair of hands.” Here he lifted his nose and sniffed the air like a hound. “Is that supper you’re cooking?”
“I reckon.”