"We want to get out of dis shop and make for the shore, dat's what we want, and dat's what we'll do."
"Ah . . . how?"
"We'll take de law into our own hands. If we sink her now we can make for the mout' of de Plate, or we might be picked up sooner. I've told de men; I've told how we was all goin' to be rich an' safe and would have been trowin' our money around ashore by now if you hadn't got de praise-de-Lord bug in your head."
"What Massa Lemaire say quite true, sah," called out a burly negro, whose black face was greyed over in patches from disease, "an' we aren't goin' to stand dis any longer. If you won't sink her we're goin' to, or we'll all be dead men."
"We're dead now, dead and rotting," shrieked the bo'sun, on a sudden note of frenzy that pierced the air like a thrown blade, "who ever saw live men rot?" And he held up a hand which scurvy, on an open wound, had literally rotted so that the tendons hung down like weed. He shook the maimed thing at Elderkin. "Look at this"—"And this . . ."—"And this . . ." came up to Elderkin in angry shouts. The men, intoxicated by the sudden venting of their wrongs, began to swarm up the ladders to the poop deck.
Elderkin felt new life urge through his veins, the pressure of the dead weeks behind sloughed off him, as the thinning veils of sleep drop away from the waking consciousness in the morning. He did not pull out his gun, but kept his hands in his pockets and faced the snarling, tentative, ugly pack of them.
Then he talked, not raising his voice more than was needful for the grinding and creaking of the ship's labour and the weary complaining of the wind-tortured rigging.
"So you'd mutiny, would you?" he began in his soft voice, "well, first you'll listen to me. Down off that gang-way, you there . . . that's better. Well, I guess I know what you men are saying to yourselves—that I'm one man against the lot of you, and now we're no longer fighting to keep the ship afloat for our lives, you can easy get the better of me. That's what you're thinking, isn't it?"
A murmur of assent, half-threatening, half-shame-faced, came from below. To Elderkin, looking down, the men appeared as blots of deeper colour against the pale glimmer of the wet deck; their upturned faces had the abrupt fore-shortening that imparts a touch of the ludicrous, but those faces were set in folds which told of hardened determination, behind the swellings and boils which glistened in the watery light, so that Elderkin could see each disfigurement as clearly as pebbles in a pool unshaded from the sky.
"The mate tells you you'll get a lot of money if you go home and say you've sunk the ship. You won't. He will, as Judas did for betraying his Lord, but you'll just be got rid of, if you don't keep your mouths shut. You're wrong, as you've been all your lives, as I've been till now. But I've a stronger man on my side than all of you herring-gutted sons of a gun would make rolled together. I've the Lord on my side. You think nothing of that, do you? The Lord's up in heaven and won't notice what you do, and you ain't feared of the likes of Him anyway. . . . Aren't you? Why d'you think it is you have bloody sacrifices there in the fo'c'sle—oh, yes, I know about it all—why d'you suppose you cringe to that nigger there"—pointing to the mate—"with his black history of murdered children and flesh eaten in secret when the sacred drum beats at the full of the moon? Why d'you suppose you're scared sick of a dirty bug and a bit of wool in an old bottle, or of my Bible that I've set up on a shelf? It's because you know there's something behind—behind your ju-jus and behind my ju-ju. . . . You not fear the Lord! Why, you fear Him with every devilish performance you concoct. You're afraid all the time—of the something behind. And my ju-ju is greater than your ju-ju, so you're more afraid of mine, and of me. Could your ju-ju bring you through the great storm alive? All of you—and that damned baby-eater there—you was all yelling at your ju-jus and they couldn't wag one of their accursed fingers to help you. Who saved you and brought you out alive? White men and the white men's God. You know there's something behind, and what's behind me is bigger'n what's behind you. . . ."