“Is that you, Mister?” he asked.
“Yes, sir: I brought six more.”
“Come on up there, you.”
When the six stood on the deck, the captain spoke to them.
“You are on board a British ship,” he said. “The rules are: no smoking and no matches between decks. Any of you caught striking a light below there will sleep on the fo’c’sle head. Write your names here. Anderson, show them where they belong.”
One of the boat’s crew helped them down a perpendicular iron ladder into the gloom of a ’tweendecks which smelt of decayed malt. A spare starboard sidelight cast a green light on one side of this space, so that Hi could see many bodies lying on sails. On the other side of the space two planks upon casks made a table on which some food was spread, in bread-barges.
“You can get your supper if you’d like,” Anderson said, showing the bread-barges. “Or you can turn in on the sails, if you’d rather rest. Your lot makes it forty-one that we got. We’ll be able to have some fine sing-songs. The steward says we shall probably sail within three days for New York. There’s fresh water in the bucket there and a dipper to drink by. Any matches you’ve got, you’ve got to give to me.”
When Anderson had gone, Hi drew away from the six to a lonely space on the sails, where he dragged a hatch cover over himself, so that he might think alone. He had had his first wrestle with life; he reckoned that he had been an utter failure. The future was dark enough, but it was nothing to the darkness of the present.
“I failed,” he thought. “And I’ve probably killed ’Zeke. And ’Zeke has brought Don Manuel to death; and the Piranhas are probably killed too, burnt out, anyway. And I’ve probably settled Carlotta’s fate as well. They are certain to kill her; all by not avoiding politics, as Winter told me. They might all be alive now, if I’d not stirred.”
The mate, who was walking the deck near the hatch, partly lest the boat should be needed, but mainly to detect any striking of a match among the refugees, sat upon the coamings for a minute, humming his tune of the old-time religion. “Ah, the old-time religion,” Hi thought, with the tears running down his face. “Nothing but religion’s any help to a man in my state. Oh, God, I have made a mess of it.”