"—— —— ——!" cried Wulfrey, springing up ablaze with indignation. "Do you dare to think I would touch your dirty pilferings?" and it looked as though the next instant would find them at grips.
But the mate had broken out in the sudden discovery of his loss. Wulf stood full as tall as himself. He looked very fit and capable, and looked, moreover, as the mate's common sense told him, as soon as it got the chance, the last person in the world to tamper with another man's goods—even though he might be the only one circumstantially able to have done so.
"It's gone anyway," he growled. "But it's no good fighting about it."
"That's not enough. Your greed for gain has blinded you. Till you come to your senses I've nothing more to do with you," and for two days not a word passed between them.
Each prepared his own food as and when he chose, and ate it apart from the other. The mate hung about as though loth to leave Wulfrey in sole charge at home, and the atmosphere of the little cabin was murky and charged with lightning.
On the third day Wulfrey ostentatiously set off for the wreck-pile by himself. He was running out of tobacco and would not have accepted any from the mate if it had been offered.
He waded out, made a rough raft on Macro's lines, and smashed open such seamen's chests as he could discover, for it was always in them that they found tobacco.
He got several small lots, and a couple of new pipes, and a flint and steel, charged his raft with a keg of rum and a case of hard-tack, and managed to get it all back to the spit and to the ship single-handed.
As he came up the side, the mate met him, with the missing crucifix in his hand.
"The little deevil of a thing," he said, with quite unconscious incongruity, "had slipped down a crack, back o' the locker, and I were wrong to think ye could have taken it."