“He seems likely to guide this ship into trouble enough,” Cheviot answered crisply.
“What is he doing now?” Hildegarde asked.
“He’s—” Reinhart began and hesitated.
Under his breath O’Gorman finished the sentence. “Trying to incite a lot of fools to mutiny.”
“What does he want them to do?”
“Put the captain in irons.”
“What!”
“And turn the ship over to the pilot and first officer—that fellow coming off the bridge now.”
Hildegarde followed Louis’s eyes and saw they were fixed not on the dapper officer descending, but were on the square figure of the captain standing motionless on the bridge, looking down at the coolies busy as ants about the hold. But he looked, not as if he saw them. The hard face was red and angry. Hildegarde, with her genius for sympathy, divined something in it infinitely miserable, too. “How lonely the man looks,” she said aside to Cheviot.
“You can’t be at the head of things and not be lonely.”