Bill, who was big and brawny, rose with an air of sorrowful resignation. "This —— nonsense has got to be stopped," he said, and walked tranquilly towards the negro. "You wouldn't listen to reason, Black-funnel-paint."
Then, before the latter quite realised what had happened to him, a grimy fist descended upon his jaw, and as he staggered backwards somebody seized his shoulders and whirled him round. In another moment Bill kicked with all his might, and the negro went out headlong through the open gangway into the creek alongside. In the meanwhile the Spaniards came tumbling from the hatch, and, though they were quiet men, they carried long Canary knives. The sight of them was enough for the negroes, and they followed their leader, plunging from the gangway or over the rail. Their canoes still lay beneath the quarter, and though Tom hurled a few big lumps of coal on them as they got under way, they were flying up the creek in another minute, with paddles flashing.
Then Bill explained the affair to the Canarios as well as he could, and afterward drew his comrade back into the shadow of the deck-house to hold a council. Both of them felt somewhat lonely as they blinked at the desolation of dingy mangroves which hemmed them in. There was, so far as they knew, not a white man in that part of Africa, and the intentions of the negroes were apparently by no means amicable.
"Funnel-paint may come back an' bring his friends," said Tom. "I don't know what's to stop him if he wants to. There's not a gun in the ship except Mr. Jefferson's pistol, an' those Canary fellows' knives, an' we can't worry Mr. Jefferson about the thing when he's too sick to understand. If I'd only begun on him for fever he might have been better."
"I'm thankful," said Bill, "as he isn't dead. It wouldn't be very astonishing, but that don't matter."
"You'd think it mattered a good deal if you was Mr. Jefferson. If I wasn't that anxious about him I'd let you try your hand an' see how easy it is worrying out that book. As it is, one of us is enough."
"I'm thinking," said Bill sourly, "as it's a —— sight too much!"
Tom glared at him a moment, for one of the effects that climate has upon a white man's nerves is to keep him in a state of prickly irritation; but he was more anxious than he cared to confess, too anxious, indeed, to force a quarrel.
"Well," he said, "I'll ask you what you mean another time. Just now, we've got to do a little for Mr. Jefferson and a little for ourselves. Eight pound a month, all found, and a fifty-pound bonus when he gets her off, isn't to be picked up everywhere, and, of course, there's no telling when you an' me may get the fever. Now, then, we want a boss who isn't sick, an' more men, as well as a doctor."
"Of course. How're you goin' to get 'em?"