CHAPTER IX.
BOUND SOUTH.
After having fired four or five rounds of ammunition without other effect than the grazing of Andy’s ear, the mutineers appeared to have grown tired of such useless work, and ceased to waste their cartridges.
The calm was still “raging.” There was not wind enough to have caused any perceptible motion in a feather, and those who had taken possession of their own again could not do otherwise than remain idle, waiting for that which, by filling the white sails, would carry them far from their enemies.
On the shore the mutineers sat watching the schooner, unable to do anything toward regaining her, and, as Jenkins expressed it, “eating their hearts out” with anger, because they had been so foolish as to take all the weapons ashore, leaving the ship-keepers virtually defenseless.
The man who had been bowled over by a belaying-pin recovered consciousness after the firing ceased, and, with a very disagreeable sensation in his head, sat on the main hatch, probably wondering what was to become of him.
“Are you going to keep that thing?” the mate asked of Captain Mansfield, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb at the disconsolate-looking mutineer.
“Let him swim ashore when there’s a chance of our crawling away from this key.”
“Why not use him first?”
“How do you mean?”
“If a breeze should spring up now those fellows on the beach would amuse themselves by making targets of us while we were raising the anchor and making sail.”