Mat Turnby shifted his large body to a position of greater ease, tilted slightly the rum cask on which he was sitting, and leaned back against the fully rigged mast, balancing himself carefully in accordance with the gentle roll of the ship.
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Mat,” remarked a wiry, black-bearded man, who squatted on a coil of rope some six feet away. “I’ve been on this ship two years now, and how many fights have I had with the Preventative folk? Three! How many hands did we lose in the lot? Eleven! That’s not danger!”
“Ah!” said the other, wisely nodding his head, “maybe, maybe, Blueneck, but it’s some nine months since we last went foul them coastguards and since then we’ve been coming and going as though the damned old Channel belonged to us. Such scatter-brained tricks don’t pay in the end.”
“You be careful what you’re saying, Mat Turnby,” piped a shivering, miserable, little man, who was trying to protect himself from the cutting February wind with a ragged, parti-coloured blanket which he continually wrapped and unwrapped about his skeleton-like shoulders, “you be careful what you’re saying. All kinds o’ things on this ship have ears,” and he nodded once or twice significantly.
The big man moved uneasily on his unstable seat, but he answered boldly enough:
“I saying? Here, you mind what you’re saying, you snivelling rat! Saying? I’m not saying aught as I am ashamed of—I say these daring tricks don’t pay in the end—and—and—they don’t,” he finished abruptly.
“Oh! it’s not for the likes o’ us to talk about what the Captain does,” said the little man whiningly. He snuffled noisily and unwrapped and wrapped his blanket again. “Not for the likes o’ us,” he repeated.
“Who’s saying aught of the Cap’n?” roared Mat, bringing the cask to the deck with a thud. “Who’s saying aught of the Cap’n?”
“Oh! no one, no one at all,” said the shiverer, considerably startled. Then he added, as the big man slid back against the mast once more: “But if no one did—that’s all right, ain’t it? If no one did, I say.”
Mat swore a round of obscene oaths under his breath and there was silence for a minute or two.