They had gone on to the bridge again and they were talking like this with an eye always upon the Minerva, that arbiter of their destinies.
“That’s easy enough to understand,” said Harman. “What gets me is how to understand our position. What the deuce did that scuffy want, cartin’ off the log and the ship’s papers for? Ain’t there no law to protect an innocent vessel bein’ manhandled by a durned British cruiser in times of peace? What’s to become of peaceful tradin’ if such things is allowed? Where’s the rights of neutrals if a monkey on a stick like that blue-an’-gold outrage on the name of a sailor can walk on board you an’ walk off with the log book in his pocket? That’s what I want to know. I’m not a man that wants much in this here world. I only wants justice.”
“Faith, and I think you are going to get it,” said the Captain. “Bare justice, as the little boy’s mother said when she let down his pants. I’m not saying I didn’t do most of the inciting to the piracy and plundering, but whether or no we are all in the soup, and the chap with the ladle is fishing for us, and there’s no use in bothering or laying blame—we’d have shared equally in the profits.”
“Oh, I’m makin’ no remarks,” said Harman. “I’m not the man to fling back at a pal, and I guess I can take the kicks just the same as the ha’pence, but you’ve a better headpiece than me, and what I say is, be on the lookout to get the weather gauge of these jokers so be it’s possible. You can do it if any man can—get out of the soup and be a pineapple.”
“Give us a chance,” said the Captain. “I’m not going to haul my colours down without a fight for it.”
They stood watching the Minerva. Men were cleaning brasswork on board of her, a squad of sailors were doing Swedish exercises; the ship’s work was going on as unconcernedly as though she were lying in harbour, and this vision of cold method and absolute indifference to all things but duty and routine did not uplift the hearts of the gazers.
“They’re stuffed with pride, those chaps,” said the single-minded Harman. “They potter about and potter about the seas with their noses in the air, lookin’ down at the likes of us who do all the work’s to be done in the world. And what do they do? Nothin’! They never carry an ounce of grain or a hoof or hide, or mend a cable or fetch a letter, and they looks down on us that do as dirt. You saw that josser in the brass-bound coat and the way he come aboard—they’re all alike.”
“She’s moving up to us,” said the Captain, suddenly changing his position. “She’s going to speak us.”
The Minerva, with a few languid flaps of her propeller, was indeed moving up to them. When she came ranging alongside, within megaphone distance, a thing—a midshipman, Blood said—speaking through a megaphone nearly as big as itself addressed the Penguin.
“Ship ahoy! You are to follow us down to Christobal Island.”