"Gracious heaven!" I exclaimed, "What is all this about? If I am to be——"
"Where's the powder?" asked he, and brushing by me, like a rocket, to get across the cabin, brought his shoulder so forcibly in contact with my chest, that he knocked all the breath out of my lungs, and broke my second sentence into pieces.
"Where's the powder?" again asked he, his voice ascending in the scale of articulation.
"How am I to know?" fulminated the one, angrily, loading his gun with the despatch of an adroit musketeer. "Am I a magazine?"
"No; I know that," said the other, tartly.
"Well; what's the good of baiting a fellow when he's busy," replied the first decisively.
I could rest no longer in ignorance of my fate, and I scrambled on deck. The vessel labouring very much in a heavy sea, had not a stitch of canvass on her, and her bare mast tapered into the air like a cocoa-nut tree that had been discrowned.
"What is all this?" I said, appealing to one man who had hold of the tiller, and, with his neck extended like a race-horse, seemed to be steering as if the greatest way was on the vessel.
"Look there, your Honour," and without removing his eyes from the bow of the cutter, he pointed the thumb of his left hand over his shoulder. I turned, and saw, half a mile astern, the cause of all this uproar. But I had barely a clear conception of what I was looking at, when my companions with loaded guns reappeared on deck. The triggers clicked, and I assumed their guns were to be discharged at once, but D—— called out,
"Not yet; it's too far off."