He cocked his eye at Pomfrett with an expression of extraordinary significance.
“I’ll take my chance of that,” says the valiant skipper.
“Now you listen to me for a brace of shakes,” returned Dawkins, with a sudden change of manner. “This is straight talk, this is. I know where I stand. I’m a-going to play the square game. You can see for yourself I’ve naught to gain by telling you. But as sure as sunrise, if anyone but Dawkins—or Cap’n Murch, maybe, but he ain’t about, you say?—as sure as death, I say, if you takes command of that there ship, there’ll be mutiny, hot mutiny, damned hot. By the bones of the deep, Mr Pomfrett, there’ll be a bloody throat-cutting, gospel truth there will.”
Pomfrett glanced uneasily at Morgan Leroux. The probability of the statement was undeniable. Love and war are excellent pursuits, but they should be carried on separately. Dawkins dropped the lids over his little, twinkling eyes, and seemed to study the table.
“Under favour, commander,” he resumed, presently, “I would humbly suggest another way—me what has a rope round his neck and feels the hemp rough on his skin a’ready.”
“Well?”
“Declare the dividend as you say, all well and good. The officers, they don’t know—any more than you do, come to that, Mr Pomfrett—they don’t know, not being told, d’ye see, that the ship ain’t being sailed on the private account for the owners’ satisfaction, all the samey as we started, so there won’t be no trouble about the dividend of the plunder. You and me can settle that, private. Then there’s pickings for the crew, for we ain’t been altogether idle while you was a holiday-making in Barbadoes, so there won’t be no trouble about that, neither. And then—well, I hardly like to mention it, commander, I don’t indeed.”
“Speak up,” says Brandon.
“Why,” Dawkins went on, with a sort of deprecating suggestion that he was laying himself open to a painful misunderstanding, and knew it, and could bear it—“why, it come into my mind that bygones being bygones, and you and Mr Winter aboard again, all shipshape and comfortable, and the dividend being declared, and all, d’ye see,”—Mr Dawkins’s laborious insinuation of extraordinary sincerity was a thing to behold—“I thought to myself, d’ye see, why not let things be as they was afore, commander?”
“You mean, you propose to retain the command of the Blessed Endeavour yourself—is that it?”