“How should I know?”
“Old Lovejoy!” Here Jack raised his glass of grog, and took a long pull at it, looking over the rim at Tom all the while. Tom was looking down, picking hard at the corner of the table.
“I don’t see that this is any concern of mine,” he said, in a low voice.
“Don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you what concern it is of yours; I’m to be first mate, and I want you to be second,—and now the murder’s out!”
Tom shook his head, but he said nothing.
Jack Baldwin slid his palm down, until it rested on the back of Tom’s hand. “Look’ee, Tom Granger,” said he, roughly; “I like you. We’ve been messmates more than once, and I don’t forget how you kept that yellow coolie devil from jabbing his d—d snickershee into my back, over off Ceylon. There’s no man in all the world that I’d as soon have for a shipmate as you. Old Lovejoy, too;—he says that he must have you. He knows very well that there isn’t a better seaman living than the one that stands in Tom Granger’s shoes. Don’t be a fool! Go to the old man, name your own figure, for he’ll close with you at any reasonable terms.”
So Jack talked and talked, and Tom listened and listened, and the upshot of it was that he promised to go and see old Mr. Lovejoy again the next morning.
You may easily guess how it all turned out, for when a man not only finds that he is in temptation, but is willing to be there, he is pretty sure to end by doing that which he knows is not right.
So Tom drank another glass of Mr. Lovejoy’s fine old sherry, the old gentleman offered liberal terms, and the end of the matter was that Tom promised to enter as second mate of the Nancy Hazlewood, privateersman.
Tom Granger has always felt heartily ashamed of himself because of the way that he acted in this matter. It is not that privateering was so bad; I pass no judgment on that, and I know that there were many good men in that branch of the service.