The next moment she had disappeared, going through the cabin and into the stateroom of the villain who even now stood on deck just overhead. I was tempted again to go on deck and stand near him, close to the rail. In the darkness a sudden rush and thrust from my knife, and no one might see the outcome. But, no, it would only make matters worse. The daylight would show the leader missing, and I could not hold the gang in check. I finally made my way to my room and turned in.
CHAPTER XXI.
The morning dawned upon a wild sea. We were running off to the eastward so fast that it was necessary to stop the Arrow. The tremendous sea following us threatened several times to board, and about nine o’clock in the morning a big fellow fell in the waist. A dozen men were standing near the galley door when the water fell on deck, and a full hundred tons of it thundered upon the rascals. All forward disappeared in the white smother, and I had just a glimpse of a puff of white steam mingling with the storm of spray and splinters. The whole side of the galley had been swept away and the place gutted, the double planking being torn off as though a heavy shell had struck and exploded within.
Six men were carried overboard with the wash, and nothing could be done for them. They passed out of sight before we recovered from the shock of the rushing water. Benson stood near me on the poop and smiled grimly.
“She won’t stand many like that, will she?” he asked.
“One or two more will finish her,” I assented. “We will have to stop her.”
By desperate endeavour I managed to get some men to the braces, and after half an hour’s hard work hove the Arrow to in as mighty a sea as ever ran in the South Atlantic. She would drop her long jib-boom down the side of a hill of water until it dipped, while looking over the stern we could still see a long way up the slanting sea. It was a grand but disagreeable sight, for we were ill manned for heavy weather, and I had no officers except Brown to help or relieve me. But she rode it down without further mishap, plunging for two days before the gale subsided and allowed us to get way upon her again. Then the weather moderated and we stood along upon our course to the southwest. The stove was rigged up in the galley, and the hungry men, now desperate with the hardship, grumbled and growled and showed a temper which boded no good.
We had made nothing toward our destination for some days, and when this fact became known, I was treated to growls and surly looks from all hands.
On the sixteenth day of our run we were about three hundred miles to the eastward of the River Plate and had crossed the thirty-fifth parallel. One or two sails had been sighted; but we had never raised the craft above the horizon’s rim, and the men had become hopeful in their security. But, with a gang of cutthroats, an easy, quiet life soon palls. After the danger of hanging disappears for a time, they soon become discontented for lack of excitement. They long for some new danger to interest them. The past is not pleasant to dwell upon and the present is dull.
On this sixteenth day the men were grouped about the main-deck in the afternoon, as had been their custom from the start. Some were playing cards in the lee of the deck-house, while others threw dice or lounged and smoked in the gangways. Benson was below, but his trusty man, Johnson, was on the poop. I had occasion to send a man aloft to overhaul a leech-line, and the man who went up was a sharp-eyed young villain who had been to sea before and knew what was needed.