“What do you mean?” I demanded; for, having sped his shaft, he was turning away.
“What do I mean?” he cried. “And it’s you that asks me! ’Tis not what I mean, but what the Wolf ’ll mean. The Wolf, I said, the Wolf!”
“If trouble comes, will you stand by?” I asked impulsively, for he had voiced my own fear.
“Stand by? ’Tis old fat Louis I stand by, an’ trouble enough it’ll be. We’re at the beginnin’ iv things, I’m tellin’ ye, the bare beginnin’ iv things.”
“I had not thought you so great a coward,” I sneered.
He favoured me with a contemptuous stare. “If I raised never a hand for that poor fool,”—pointing astern to the tiny sail,—“d’ye think I’m hungerin’ for a broken head for a woman I never laid me eyes upon before this day?”
I turned scornfully away and went aft.
“Better get in those topsails, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen said, as I came on the poop.
I felt relief, at least as far as the two men were concerned. It was clear he did not wish to run too far away from them. I picked up hope at the thought and put the order swiftly into execution. I had scarcely opened my mouth to issue the necessary commands, when eager men were springing to halyards and downhauls, and others were racing aloft. This eagerness on their part was noted by Wolf Larsen with a grim smile.
Still we increased our lead, and when the boat had dropped astern several miles we hove to and waited. All eyes watched it coming, even Wolf Larsen’s; but he was the only unperturbed man aboard. Louis, gazing fixedly, betrayed a trouble in his face he was not quite able to hide.