Seeing us quite by accident, as it were, he looked wondrously surprised, as if it were difficult for him to realise that we could have so far transgressed sea customs as to venture unbidden on the quarter-deck.
Although Captain Joseph Ropes should have been the one to show respect when he and I met, because of the fact that he was my uncle’s employee, and I was a step above him in station when we were ashore, I dared not open my mouth, while he gazed at me curiously, with an expression of severe disapproval upon his face.
But for the fact that Simon was with me, and succeeded in plucking up heart at that moment, the interview which we had been waiting for so long would have come to naught, owing to my being tongue-tied.
My comrade, however, rendered desperate, as he afterward told me, by the thought that we might be forced to go forward again without having communicated our secret, stepped close by his father’s side, and said, in a low, yet emphatic tone:
“Nathan and I have discovered that which we believe you should know at once, sir.”
Captain Ropes glanced around quickly to learn if any other might have overheard his son’s words, and then said, in a low tone:
“Tell me quickly what you have learned, and do it in such manner that no one may suspect we are holding private converse.”
“There are but eighteen prisoners in the brig, sir, and yet by Nathan Crowninshield’s reckoning, as well as my own, there should be nineteen.”
“Nineteen were sent below,” the captain said, after a brief pause, during which I fancied he was running over in his mind the number of Britishers taken.