“We’ll not do it, boy,” he said. “We think we know a man when we see one, as well as having occasion to know that you’re white all through. And we’re not inclined to set the talk of women against what we think best to do. So you stick to your job, and we’re back of you.”
In spite of myself, I choked up. I tried to tell them what their loyalty meant to me; but I could only hold out my hand, and, one by one, they came up and shook it solemnly.
“We think,” McNamara said, when, last of all, he and Adams came up, “that it would be best, lad, if we put down in the log-book all that has happened last night and to-day, and this just now, too. It’s fresh in our minds now, and it will be something to go by.”
So Burns and I got the log-book from the captain’s cabin. The axe was there, where we had placed it earlier in the day, lying on the white cover of the bed. The room was untouched, as the dead man had left it—a collar on the stand, brushes put down hastily, a half-smoked cigar which had burned a long scar on the wood before it had gone out. We went out silently, Burns carrying the book, I locking the door behind us.
Mrs. Johns, sitting near the companionway with the revolver on her knee, looked up and eyed me coolly.
“So they would not do it!”
“I am sorry to disappoint you—they would not.”
She held up my revolver to me, and smiled cynically.
“Remember,” she said, “I only said you were a possibility.”
“Thank you; I shall remember.”