"I'll give you a hundred apiece. Now stop talking and come on. We'll have to run her stern fore-most, and if we can keep the wheel going enough for steerage way, the wind will blow us in," haggled the captain like an old market woman.
"A hundred dollars will not interest me; how about you, Ben?" Hiram turned to me and began taking the lifeboat's rope from the cleet and I did the same. "You can stay here and drown if you want to, but we're going. The water here looks pretty deep, and I understand when a ship goes down it makes a pretty big hole into which we might fall," he added as we began to lower the boat.
"How much do you want? I've got to save her," he pleaded now, walking back and forth like a caged hyena.
"If you hadn't let your wireless man go you would have had a tug or another ship here by this time and they would take as salvage only about a quarter of a million," suggested Hiram with a cynical smile, stopping the descent of the boat and making fast again. "We'll stay, but you've got to pay. Ben here knows something about the engines and I will shovel the coal, but you've got to give us two-fifty apiece," he added, taking away my breath and almost prostrating the captain.
The captain began to pace the deck again, then pausing in front of Hiram, he said, as though imbued with a big idea: "All right, I guess I'll have to do it, but you've got to hustle." Moving over to me, he asked if I knew how to start the engines, to which I nodded an affirmative.
"But, Captain," interrupted Hiram forcibly, "it's got to be cash," and there came to his mirthful mouth a certain hardness that surprised me, and again started incipient apoplexy within the captain.
"If I say you'll get it, you'll get it. Isn't my word good for that much?" he blurted out, trying to control his rage.
"Captain, you left us to drown just like kittens you would like to be rid of. Your word isn't worth a counterfeit dollar. I wouldn't trust you for shoestrings. We've got to have the cash—now!" There was genuine bitterness in Hiram's voice.
"I haven't that much cash on the ship," pleaded the captain, but with a sort of wolfish gleam in his eyes.