Jefferson laughed, though he found, somewhat to his concern, that he could not see the man very well.
"I'm going to hold up until I knock the bottom of this contract out," he said, good-humouredly. "I can't do it if I stop and talk to you. Get a move on. Light out of this!"
The man went back. He had done what he felt was his duty, though he had not expected that it would be of very much use, and Jefferson started the winch. It hammered and rattled, and the barrels came up, slimy and dripping, with patches of whitewash still clinging to them. The glare of it dazzled Jefferson until he could scarcely see them as they swung beneath the derrick-boom, but he managed to drop them into the surfboat alongside and pile the rest on deck, when she slid down the creek with a row of negroes paddling on either side. The steamer had struck the forest at the time of highest water, and it was necessary to take everything out of her if she was to be floated during the coming rainy season.
He toiled on for another hour, with a racking pain in his head, and the Canarios toiled in the stifling hold below, until there was a jar and a rattle, and a big puncheon that should have gone into the surfboat came down with a crash amidst them, and, bursting, splashed them with yellow oil. Then the man who had remonstrated with Jefferson went up the ladder in haste. The winch had stopped, and Jefferson lay across it, amidst a coil of slack wire, with a suffused face. The man, who stooped over him, shouted, and the rest who came up helped to carry him to his room beneath the bridge. The floor was slanted so that one could scarcely stand on it, and as the berth took the same list, they laid him where the side of it met the bulkhead. He lay there, speechless, with half-closed eyes, and water and palm oil soaking from him.
"Now," said the man who had given Jefferson good advice, "you'll get these Spaniards out of this, Bill. Then you'll go on breaking the puncheons out. Wall-eye, here, can run the winch for you, but you can come back in half an hour when I've found out what's wrong with the skipper."
Bill seemed to recognise that his comrade had risen to the occasion. "Well," he said, "I s'pose there's no use in me sayin' anything. All I want to know is, how you're going to do it?"
"See that?" and the other man pointed to a chest beneath the settee. "It's full of medicines, an' there's a book about them. Good ole Board of Trade!"
"How d'you know those medicines arn't all gorn?" asked Bill.
"They arn't. I've been in. There's a bottle of sweet paregoricky stuff I came round for a swigg of when Mr. Jefferson wasn't there now and then. It warms you up kind of comfortin'."
Bill went away with the Spaniards, and, in place of improving the occasion by looking for liquor, as he might, perhaps, have been expected to do, went on with his task. The English sailorman does not always express himself delicately, but he is, now, at least, very far from being the dissolute, unintelligent ruffian he is sometimes supposed to be. There is no doubt of this, for shipowners know their business, and while there is no lack of Teutons and cheerful, sober Scandinavians, a certain proportion of English seamen still go to sea in English ships. The man who sat in Jefferson's room could, at least, understand the treatise in the medicine chest, although it was one approved by the Board of Trade, which august body has apparently no great fondness for lucid explanations. He was, however, still pouring over it when his comrade thrust his head into the doorway again, and it is possible that Jefferson had not suffered greatly from the fact that he had not as yet quite decided on any course of treatment.