He took a pinch of snuff, and flapping his coat-tails (for he was always rigged out in the naval officer way) he answered what I wished.
"As between shipmates, I will do my duty," said he.
"I knew it; I've known it from the beginning," said I. "What's left when you've done is the shore part, and that's not so easy. Peter Bligh's coming, and I couldn't well leave Dolly on board. Give me our hulking carpenter, Seth Barker, and I'll lighten the ship no more. We're short-handed as it is. And, besides, if four won't serve, then forty would be no better. What we can do yonder, wits, and not revolvers, must bring about. But I'll not go with sugar-sticks, you take my word for it, and any man that points a gun at me will wish he'd gone shooting sheep."
"Aye, aye, to that," cried Peter, who was ever a man for a fight; "the shooting first and the civil words after. That's sense and no blarney. When my poor father was tried at Swansea, his native place, for hitting an Excise man with a ham———"
"Mr. Bligh," cried I, "'tis not with hams you'll be hitting folks yonder, take my word for it. This job may find us on a child's errand or it may find us doing men's work. Eight bells on the first watch will tell the whole of the story. Until that time I shall hold my tongue about it, but I don't go ashore as I go to a picnic, and I don't make a boast about what I may presently cry out about."
Well, they were both of my way of thinking, and when we'd talked a little more about it, and I'd opened the arm-chest and looked over the few guns and pistols we'd got there, and we'd called the lad Dolly down and promised him that he should come with us, and the men had been given to understand that the skipper was to go ashore by-and-bye on an important business, Peter and the others went to their dinner and I took my turn on the bridge. The swell was running strongly then, and the wind blew fresh from the north-east. We'd lost all sight of the island, and spoke but one ship, a small mail steamer from Santa Cruz bound for the Yellow Sea, which signalled us "All well" at six bells in the afternoon watch. From that time I went dead slow and began to bring the Southern Cross about. The work was begun that very hour, I always say.
Now, I've told all this, short and brief, and with no talk of my own about it. The thing had come so sudden, I knew so little of Ruth Bellenden's trouble or of what had befallen her on the island, that I was like a man in the dark groping blindly, yet set on hearing the truth. As for the crew, well, you may be sure that Dolly Venn had put his side of the story about, and when they knew that my mistress was ashore there and in some danger, I believe they'd have put me in irons if I'd so much as spoken of going back.
Risky it was, so much I won't deny; but who wouldn't risk more than his own paltry skin to save a woman in trouble, and she, so to speak, a shipmate? There was not a man aboard, stake my life, who wouldn't have gone to the land willingly for Ruth Bellenden's sake though he'd been told, sure and certain, that Ken's Island must be his grave. And we'd always the ship, mind you, and the knowledge that she would go to 'Frisco to get us help. A fool's hope, I say now. For how could we know that the Southern Cross would be at the bottom of the sea, a thousand fathoms down, before the week was run? We couldn't know it; yet that was what happened, and that is why no help came to us.
We had put the ship about at six bells in the afternoon watch, but it was eight bells in the second dog (the night being too clear for my liking and a full moon showing bright in the sky) that we sighted Ken's Island for the second time, and for the second time prepared to go ashore. The longboat was ready by this time, her barrels full of water and her lockers full of biscuit. Such arms as we were to carry were partly stowed in water-proof sheeting—the rifles, and the cartridges for them; but the revolvers we carried, and a good Sheffield knife a man, which we weren't going to cut potatoes with. For the rest, I made them put in a few stout blankets, and more rations than might have served for such a trip. "Good beginnings make good endings," said I; "what we haven't need of, lads, we can carry aboard again. The longboat's back won't ache, be sure of it."
All this, I say, was done when the moon showed us the island like a great barren rock rising up sheer from the sea. And when it was done, Mister Jacob called my attention to something which in the hurry of shore-going I might never have seen at all or thought about. It was nothing less than this—that their fool's beacon was out to-night, and all the sea about it as black as ink. Whoever set up the light, then, did not use it for a seaman's benefit, but for his own whim. I reckoned up the situation at a glance, and even at that early stage I began to know the terrible meaning of it.