Their cries are stifled by huge woollen caps drawn over their heads, and down to their chins, almost choking them. But though no longer seeing, and only indistinctly hearing, they can tell where they are being taken. They feel themselves lifted over the vessel’s side, and lowered down man-ropes into a boat; along the bottom of which they are finally laid, and held fast—as if they had fallen into the jaws of those terrible tintoreras, they so lately looked at keeping company with the ship!
Chapter Sixty.
The Scuttlers.
Harry Blew is in the hold, Bill Davis beside him.
They are standing on the bottom-timbers on a spot they have selected for their wicked work, and which they have had some difficulty in finding. They have reached it, by clambering over sandal-wood logs, cases of Manilla cigars, and piles of tortoise-shell. Clearing some of these articles out of the way, they get sight of the vessel’s ribs, and at a point they know to be under the water-line. They know also that a hole bored between their feet, though ever so small, will in due time fill the barque’s hold with water, and send her to the bottom of the sea.
Davis, auger in hand, stands in readiness to bore the hole; waiting for the first officer to give the word.
But something stays the latter from giving it, as the former from commencing the work.
It is a thought that seems to occur simultaneously to both, bringing their eyes up to one another’s faces, in a fiancé mutually interrogative. Blew is the first to put it in speech.