“Since you ask for it,” responds Gomez, speaking for the first time on this special matter, “my opinion is, that there’s no need for any difference among us. Mr Blew’s against the spilling of blood, and so would I, if it could be avoided. But it can’t, with safety to ourselves; at least not in the way he has suggested. To act as he advises would be madness on our part—nay more, it might be suicide. Still, there don’t seem any necessity for a cold cutting of throats, which has an ugly sound about it. The same with knocking on the head; they’re both too brutal. I think I know a way that will save us from resorting to either, and, at the same time, ensure our own safety.”
“What way?” demanded several voices. “Tell us!”
“One simple enough; so simple, I wonder you haven’t all thought of it, same as myself. Of course, we intend sending this craft to the bottom of the sea. But she’s not likely to go down all of a sudden; nor till we’re a good way off out of sight. We can leave the gentlemen aboard, and let them slip quietly down along with her!”
“Why, that’s just what Blew proposes,” say several.
“True,” returns Gomez; “but not exactly as I mean it. He’d leave them free to go about the ship—perhaps get out of her before she sinks, on a sofa, or hencoop, or something.”
“How would you do with them?” asks one, impatiently.
“Tie, before taking leave of them.”
“Bah!” exclaims Padilla, a monster to whom spilling blood seems congenial. “What’s the use of being at all that bother? It’s sure to bring some. The skipper will resist, and so’ll the old Don. What then? We’ll be compelled to knock them on the head all the same, or toss them overboard. For my part, I don’t see the object of making such a worry about it; and still say, let’s stop their wind at once!”
“Dash it, man!” cries Striker, hitherto only a listener, but a backer of Harry Blew; “you ’pear to ’a been practisin’ a queery plan in jobs o’ this sort. Mr Gomez hev got a better way o’t, same as I’ve myself seed in the Australian bush, wheres they an’t so bloodthirsty. When they stick up a chap theer, so long’s he don’t cut up nasty, they settle things by splicin’ him to a tree, an’ leavin’ him to his meditashuns. Why can’t we do the same wi’ the skipper, an’ the Don, an’ the darkey—supposin’ any o’ ’em to show reefractry?”
“That’s it!” exclaims Davis, strengthening the proposal thus endorsed by his chum, Striker. “My old pal’s got the correct idea of sich things.”