Garrard laid down the pipe he had been smoking, and, in happy unconsciousness of any audience but the woman at his feet, began to sing. His voice had always been his greatest charm, and the means of gaining him the friendship of men much older than himself. It had won Hadow; it had won Francis. There was not a blue-jacket on board the Dauntless but whose eyes had moistened under the spell of Jack's clear tenor. No one could render with such delicacy, purity, and sentiment those ballads, now so old-fashioned, that used to solace our seafaring fathers in the fifties.
Jack lay back in the hammock, and with wonderful tenderness and feeling sang "Afton Water," repeating the last verse several times over. It was plain that something in it, some phrase or line, had deeply moved him, for he suddenly bent over and laid his face in his hands, shaking with a strange emotion. Tehea rose, and throwing her arms round his neck and forcing away his hands, pressed her lips to his wet eyes. Even as she did so Brady gave the signal for the whole party to move round to the entrance. He passed through first, the others close behind him. Jack leaped to his feet, white and speechless, his wide-open eyes those of an animal at bay. Brady, Winterslea, Stanbury-Jones, Hotham, Hatch, the familiar faces, daunted him like the sight of ghosts. Friends no longer, they were now avengers, with the right to track him down and kill him.
"Jack leaped to his feet, white and speechless."[ToList]
"Jack!" cried Brady in a stifled voice.
The lad took a step back. The girl moaned, and tried to run between Hatch and Stanbury-Jones. The old seaman caught and shook her like a dog, tearing away the whistle she put to her lips and dashing it on the floor. Jack put up his hand and snatched a pistol hidden in the thatch of the roof. Brady, on the instant, leveled his own and thundered out:
"Drop it, or I'll shoot!"
"Shoot, and be damned!" returned Jack, and with that he turned his pistol on himself, and, placing the muzzle against his forehead, pulled the trigger.
It missed fire.