No sooner said than done. I had obligingly saved them the trouble of booting me very far, for I had been inching myself forward ever since the onslaught. When the captain spoke, I was almost at the head of the ladder to the main deck—an instant after he spoke, I was lying on the main deck at the foot of the poop ladder, and all the stars in the universe were dancing before my eyes.
I got dizzily to my hands and knees, and then to my feet, and staggered forward. Captain Swope's soft voice followed me.
"Next time reef your tongue before you open your mouth!" he called.
I made my way into the foc'sle, and my watchmates grabbed me, and swabbed and kneaded my hurts, and swore their sympathy. My injuries were not very severe—some nasty gashes about the head and face, and innumerable bruises upon the body. Fortunately I was in no way disabled. My bones were intact. I was in far better case, they told me, than poor Holy Joe. He was lying in his bunk unconscious, that very moment; he had a broken arm, and most of his teeth were gone.
I saw at once that the men were quite wild with rage and anxiety. From the sounds that came in the foc'sle door, I knew that the mate was hazing his men. Aye, he was going after them in the good old way, quite as if there had been no peaceful interlude. I did not have to see the mates' men to know their temper; I could tell from the temper of my own watch how the other watch felt.
It was a terrific shock to most of them, that sudden return of brutality. Aye, just in that I saw the devilish cunning of Captain Swope. He knew what the effect would be upon the minds of the men of slackening his hell-ship discipline, and then, when the habit of passive endurance was weakened, suddenly tightening the reins. He knew that then the bit would be well nigh unendurable. Oh, Swope had calculated shrewdly; he foresaw the effect not only of an outburst of promiscuous brutality, but of the arrest of Newman, and the beating up of Holy Joe.
I could see the effect at a glance. The stiffs were panicky. These valorous stiffs were glowering, really dangerous at last. The squareheads were hysterical with rage. The squareheads knew why Holy Joe had suffered—because of them, because of Nils. Because of Newman, too, but they did not guess that. Then, the knowledge that Newman was trapped was a heavy blow to sailors and stiffs alike. They had all, consciously or unconsciously, depended upon Newman's sane strength. With him taken from them they felt—every man-jack—that their backs were to the wall.
Just as soon as the blood was washed out of my eyes, and I could see my mates' faces, just as quickly as the ringing in my ears subsided, and I could hear their voices, I knew that the moment was past when the peace could be kept in that foc'sle. Perhaps Newman could have composed the crowd, but I doubt it. The captain had succeeded in driving them too far and too hard, in frightening them too much. He had won, I thought despairingly; he would get his mutiny.
For it was now the elemental instinct of self-preservation that swayed the men and determined their actions. Oh, there was plenty of sympathy for me, and for Holy Joe and Newman; there was rage on our account; but underlying the sympathy and rage was a very terrible fear. It was a fear of death, a fear that each man felt for himself. Self-preservation, that's it!
My shipmates, sailors and stiffs, had reached a point where they were afraid not to take some violent and illegal action against the men in command of the ship. Their long misuse, the wrongs and indignities each man had suffered, the fate of Nils, the events of the afternoon, had all culminated in the belief these men now had—good men and bad men both, remember!—that they must revolt, that they must kill the men aft before the men aft killed them! There were other factors at work, of course, greed for gold and lust of revenge, but this simple, primal fear for their own skins was the determining factor in the situation.