Chapter Thirteen.
I learn some disturbing news.
The weather had been fine, with moderate breezes from about west-north-west, during the entire period of our sojourn at the island, and we left it under like conditions. Our course for the Horn was a south-easterly one, which brought the wind nicely over the starboard quarter, and the breeze was of just the right strength to enable us to show the whole of our starboard flight of studding-sails to it, and to handsomely reel off our eleven knots per hour by the log. Under these circumstances we were not long in running the island out of sight; and with its disappearance below the horizon I hoped that my troubles—except, of course, such as might arise from bad weather—were at an end. As for the men, their sojourn on the island had done them good, they were in splendid health and—as might be expected of men in their condition who had so easily become wealthy—in high spirits, they seemed anxious to get home, and were, one and all, upon their best behaviour, being apparently desirous of conciliating me to the utmost possible extent, now that their own ends had been served. But although I deemed it sound diplomacy to allow them to believe that their endeavours in this direction were meeting with perfect success, I could not forget that, in the prosecution of their own selfish plans, they had shown themselves to be callously criminal, and utterly indifferent to all the hardship and suffering, mental and bodily, that they were inflicting upon a young, delicately-nurtured, sensitive woman—to say nothing of what they had caused me to endure; and I determined that, if it lay in my power to scheme out such a result, they should, one and all, pay the penalty of their crimes.
The apparently favourable condition of affairs to which I have just referred continued for fully a week after our departure from the island; and then I received a rude awakening. It happened thus:
The weather was still gloriously fine, but the wind had drawn more out from the southward until it was square upon our starboard beam, which, with a decided increase in its strength, had caused us to take in all our studding-sails except the fore-topmast, the boom of which was braced well forward. It was close upon sunset; and Harry, the Cockney, was at the wheel. The sky away to the westward about the setting sun wore a decidedly smoky, windy look, with a corresponding wildness and hardness and glare of colour that seemed to threaten a blusterous night; so much so, indeed, that, pausing in my solitary perambulation of the deck, I halted near the binnacle to study it. As I did so, the helmsman, with his eye on the weather leach of the main-topgallant-sail, said:
“Don’t look at me, or take any notice of me, sir, because I don’t want them skowbanks for’ard to see me a-talkin’ to you; but I’ve got somethin’ very partic’lar as I should like to s’y, if I can only find a chaunce.”
“Well, fire away then, my lad,” said I. “No time like the present. I am looking to see whether we are going to have a breeze to-night.”
The fellow remained silent for a full minute, chewing vigorously at the plug of tobacco in his cheek, and then said, still gazing intently aloft:
“The long and the short of it’s this, sir. Them two swines, O’Gorman and Price, have been s’yin’ that after that business with the French barque, and the shootin’ of Karl and Fritz, it won’t never do to let you and the young lidy ever get ashore again.”