"You don't really mean—what you said, do you, Jasper?" she asked, with a very pitiful inflection in her low, musical voice.
"Every word," he answered her promptly. "If you don't believe me, go down and ask Captain Dove."
She turned away from him again, to hide the effect of his curt reply. But her drooping shoulders no doubt betrayed that to him. He pulled out a cigar-case and, having lighted a rank cheroot with languid deliberation, puffed that contemplatively.
"I will go down and ask Captain Dove," she said to herself at length, with tremulous courage, and was moving toward the companion-hatch when she heard from the other end of the ship a sudden ominous discord, a sound such as might have come from a nest of hornets about to swarm. There seemed to be something wrong forward; and she faced about again, instantly.
Peering through the hurtful sunshine with anxious eyes, her scarlet lips compressed and resolute, she saw that the look-out had turned on his half-baked feet to stare from the fo'c'sle into the well-deck behind him. The officer of the watch had ceased his regular march and countermarch, and was also gazing downward in that direction. Even her self-confident companion had started up from his idle posture, in obvious alarm.
A figure darted up one of the two ladders which led to the bridge. The officer of the watch had left his post by the other at the same moment, as if to avoid the new-comer, and was making his way aft, unhurriedly, yet at speed. He did not look back, but she was aware of other figures which also had appeared in a moment from nowhere, and were following him on tiptoe, under cover where it could be had. Once, a flash, as of flame, amidships, almost forced from her lips a wild cry of warning, but that was only a glint of sun on a gun-barrel where the browning had worn away and left the steel bright. And he, seemingly unaware of the danger behind him, reached the poop unharmed, a big, fair, bluff-looking, broad-shouldered man in shabby blue sea-uniform.
At the foot of the narrow stairway by which alone access could be had to the poop, he called softly up to the girl at the rail above, "They'll be at our throats in a minute, Sallie. Get you away below, quick—and warn the Old Man."
At the top of the steps he stopped, and turned, and stayed there, blocking the stairway with his great body. And the armed ruffians swarming aft in his wake slackened their pace, then hung back about the hatch on the deck below. But each had a finger crooked on the trigger of a ready rifle. The simplest word or motion misplaced at that first moment of crisis must have precipitated the murder that was to be.
The girl had obeyed him promptly, if without appearance of haste and, once out of sight of the mutineers, there was no need to study her steps. She darted across the dim, daintily appointed saloon below and, having knocked imperatively at one of the two doors on that side of the ship entered, without waiting for any permission, the stateroom it opened into.
"The men have broken out, Captain Dove," she cried, breathless a little, her bosom heaving. "They're coming aft—there isn't a moment to spare. What are we to do?"