The murmur was bursting out into a guffaw, when the judge interfered. But there was no longer any attempt at ill-timed jesting on the part of the bar, which was but bad taste at the best on so solemn an occasion.
Job continued, “I was burnt into the very muscle until I told where the gold was stowed away.”
“Aha!” screamed the lawyer, forgetting his recent discomfiture in the gladness of his success. “And all the rest were abetting, eh?”
“The rest of the fifteen were, sir.”
But the prosecutor, a glutton in his way, had thought he had bagged the whole forty-three. And so he ultimately did before the evening closed in, as most of the others were identified by other witnesses; and when they could not actually be sworn to, the piracies were brought home to them by circumstantial evidence; such, for instance, as having been captured on board of the craft we had taken, which again were identified as the very vessels which had plundered the merchantmen and murdered several of their crews, so that by six o’clock the jury had returned a verdict of Guilty—and I believe there never was a juster—against the whole of them. The finding, and sentence of death following thereupon, seemed not to create any strong effect upon the prisoners. They had all seen how the trial was going; and, long before this, the bitterness of death seemed to be past.
I could hear one of our boat’s crew, who was standing behind me, say to his neighbour, “Why, Jem, surely he is in joke. Why, he don’t mean to condemn them to be hanged seriously, without his wig, eh?”
Immediately after the judgment was pronounced, which, both as to import, and literally, I had translated to them, Captain Transom, who was sitting on the bench beside his brother officers, nodded to me, “I say, Mr Cringle, tell the coxswain to call Pearl, if you please.”
I passed the word to one of the Firebrand’s marines, who was on duty, who again repeated the order to a seaman who was standing at the door.
“I say, Moses, call the clergyman.”
Now this Pearl was no other than the seaman who pulled the stroke-oar in the gig; a very handsome negro, and the man who afterwards forked Whiffle out of the water—tall, powerful, and muscular, and altogether one of the best men in the ship. The rest of the boat’s crew, from his complexion, had fastened the sobriquet of the clergyman on him.