"And who are you, anyhow," he cries, his voice mightily hoarse even in his own ears, "to threaten to strike me! You may be a bloody pirate, and you may shoot a man from behind, as you shot poor Captain Brand on the Cobra River, but you won't dare strike me face to face. I know who you are and what you are!"
As for Sir John Malyoe, had he been struck of a sudden by palsy, he could not have stopped more dead short in his attack upon our hero. There he stood, his great, bulging eyes staring like those of a fish, his face as purple as a cherry. As for Master Informer, Barnaby had the satisfaction of seeing that he had stopped his grinning by now and was holding his master's arm as though to restrain him from any further act of violence.
By this time Captain Manly had come bustling up and demanded to know what all the disturbance meant. Whereupon our hero cried out, still in the extremity of passion:
"The villain insulted me and insulted the young lady; he threatened to strike me with his cane. But he sha'n't strike me. I know who he is and what he is. I know what he's got in his cabin in those two trunks, and I know where he found it, and whom it belongs to."
At this Captain Manly clapped his hand upon our hero's shoulder and fell to shaking him so that he could hardly stand, crying out to him the while to be silent. Says he: "How do you dare, an officer of this ship, to quarrel with a passenger of mine! Go straight to your cabin, and stay there till I give you leave to come out again."
At this Master Barnaby came somewhat back to himself. "But he threatened to strike me with his cane," he says, "and that I won't stand from any man!"
"No matter for that," says Captain Manly, very sternly. "Go to your cabin, as I bid you, and stay there till I tell you to come out again, and when we get to New York I'll take pains to inform your step-father of how you have behaved. I'll have no such rioting as this aboard my ship."
By this time, as you may suppose, the young lady was gone. As for Sir John Malyoe, he stood in the light of a lantern, his face that had been so red now gone as white as ashes, and if a look could kill, to be sure he would have destroyed Barnaby True where he stood.
It was thus that the events of that memorable day came to a conclusion. How little did any of the actors of the scene suspect that a portentous Fate was overhanging them, and was so soon to transform all their present circumstances into others that were to be perfectly different!
And how little did our hero suspect what was in store for him upon the morrow, as with hanging head he went to his cabin, and shutting the door upon himself, and flinging himself down upon his berth, there yielded himself over to the profoundest depths of humiliation and despair.