“Are ye indeed?” said I, exceedingly vexed. “Then I ken too well, Horn, the reason for the stoppage. You are to keep your eye on a man who's being bargained for with the hangman.”
“I would rather ken naithin' about that,” said he, “and onyway I think ye're mistaken. Here they're comin' back again.”
Two or three small boats were coming down on us out of the darkness; not that I could see them, but that I heard their oars in muffled rowlocks.
“If they want me,” said I sorrowfully, “they can find me down below,” and back I went and sat me in the cabin, prepared for the manacles.
CHAPTER X
THE STRUGGLE IN THE CABIN, AND AN EERIE SOUND OF RUNNING WATER
The place stank with bilge and the odour of an ill-trimmed lamp smoking from a beam; the fragments of the skipper's supper were on the table, with a broken quadrant; rats scurried and squealed in the bulkheads, and one stared at me from an open locker, where lay a rum-bottle, while beetles and slaters travelled along the timbers. But these things compelled my attention less than the skylights that were masked internally by pieces of canvas nailed roughly on them. They were not so earlier in the evening; it must have been done after I had gone to sleep, and what could be the object? That puzzled me extremely, for it must have been the same hand that had extinguished all the deck and mast lights, and though black was my crime darkness was unnecessary to my betrayal.
I waited with a heart like lead.