"Like enough, ma'am," said Cathie—"and so have the brown men."
"Men like that have no right to have wives and children," said Aunt Jannet Harvey, with vehemence past grammar. "If they have they'll be better without them. They ought to be scuttled."
Nevertheless, Jean's suggestion remained in all their minds.
Never was such a bright look-out as the Torchmen kept for the Blackbirder, as they dubbed the chase. The rigging was never free from anxious gazers. It looked as though a flight of great birds had lighted on the ship.
Jean remarked on it to Aunt Jannet Harvey.
"They're fine fellows and all of one mind. See how eager they are to catch her."
"Ay, ay!" said Aunt Jannet. "They'll find her if she's to be found," and did not think it necessary to add that, through Captain Cathie, she had offered five pounds to the man who first sighted the other ship.
Blair walked the deck strenuously, mostly alone, occasionally with one of the others. And the more he walked and the more he thought, the more averse he became to the idea of hanging.
"We're doing right for right's sake in freeing these islanders," he said to Evans and Stuart one time. "If we hang those men I can't help feeling we're doing wrong for right's sake, and there we come to the old Jesuitical practice which we all condemn. We do a wrong in the belief that it will save future trouble. I don't believe we're justified. We've got to do what seems to us right now. The future is in God's hands. If trouble comes, He will show us how to meet it."
"That, I think, is highest wisdom," said Stuart. "If the trouble comes, we shall meet it with clear consciences, and clear consciences make stout hearts."