“Hallo!” exclaimed Mr. Burns in a startled voice. “Calm again!”
I addressed him as though he had been sane.
“This is the sort of thing we’ve been having for seventeen days, Mr. Burns,” I said with intense bitterness. “A puff, then a calm, and in a moment, you’ll see, she’ll be swinging on her heel with her head away from her course to the devil somewhere.”
He caught at the word. “The old dodging Devil,” he screamed piercingly and burst into such a loud laugh as I had never heard before. It was a provoking, mocking peal, with a hair-raising, screeching over-note of defiance. I stepped back, utterly confounded.
Instantly there was a stir on the quarter-deck; murmurs of dismay. A distressed voice cried out in the dark below us: “Who’s that gone crazy, now?”
Perhaps they thought it was their captain? Rush is not the word that could be applied to the utmost speed the poor fellows were up to; but in an amazing short time every man in the ship able to walk upright had found his way on to that poop.
I shouted to them: “It’s the mate. Lay hold of him a couple of you. . . .”
I expected this performance to end in a ghastly sort of fight. But Mr. Burns cut his derisive screeching dead short and turned upon them fiercely, yelling:
“Aha! Dog-gone ye! You’ve found your tongues—have ye? I thought you were dumb. Well, then—laugh! Laugh—I tell you. Now then—all together. One, two, three—laugh!”
A moment of silence ensued, of silence so profound that you could have heard a pin drop on the deck. Then Ransome’s unperturbed voice uttered pleasantly the words: