Jefferson seemed to be holding himself in hand with a struggle, but Austin smiled.
"Well," he said, "if it comes at all, it will get the right one. I'm not going home to be married. In fact, I was told that it would be rather a graceful thing to come back upon my shield, though I don't know that I would like to do so looking as that nigger did. In the meanwhile, I had, perhaps, better see to Wall-eye's hand."
He went out into the darkness, and Jefferson stood still, with his lips set tight, leaning on the table. He was, in some respects, a hard man, and his sojourn in Africa had not roused his gentler qualities, but just then he felt an unpleasant physical nausea creeping over him again.
CHAPTER XXV
HOVE OFF
The rain came down in sheets, and the mangrove roots were hidden by the yellow flood, when Jefferson stood, dripping, on the Cumbria's bridge. Her iron deck was level, the stumpy pole masts ran upright into the drifting mist, and a column of black smoke floated sluggishly from her rusty funnel. Dingy vapour also rose from the slender one of the locomotive boiler, and cables—hemp and wire and chain—stretched between the mangroves and the steamer's bow and stern. Jefferson, leaning heavily on the bridge rails, considered them each in turn. He shivered a little, though the rain was warm, and his wet face looked unusually gaunt and worn; but his eyes were intent and steady, for at last all was ready for the supreme effort of heaving the Cumbria off.
He looked down when Austin stopped at the foot of the ladder. His face and hands were black, and the thin singlet, which was all he wore above his duck trousers, seemed glued to him.
"Hadn't you better keep inside the wheelhouse until we start the mill?" he said.
Jefferson smiled drily. "Do you think you could? What are you wandering up and down the deck for?"
"I'm not. I've been firing the locomotive boiler, and spent the last twenty minutes in the forecastle. It isn't as dry as it should be there."