‘One of them killed! Heaven have mercy upon us,’ groaned Wilfrid in my ear, and his appearance was full of dreadful consternation.
Meanwhile the brig ahead was holding steadfastly on, her crowd of people aft gazing at us as before. I took a view of them; they all held a sort of gaping posture; there were no dramatic gesticulations, no eager and derisive turning to one another, no pointing arms and backward-leaning attitudes. They had as thunderstruck an air as can be imagined in a mob of men. What they supposed us to be now after our extermination of the boat and one of the two fellows who had sought our assistance, it was impossible to conjecture.
Our boat, that had sped away from us about four times faster than we were moving through the water, hung, with lifted oars, over the spot where our cannon-ball had taken effect until the ‘Bride’ had slowly surged to within hail; then up stood sour Crimp.
‘What are we to do?’
‘Have you got both men?’ bawled Finn, who perfectly well knew that they hadn’t.
‘No; there was but one to get, and here he is,’ and Crimp pointed into the bottom of the boat.
‘Put him aboard his ship,’ cried Finn. ‘If they refuse to receive him, find out if there’s e’er a one of ’em that can speak English, and then tell them that if they don’t take him we shall arm our men and compel ’em to it; and if that don’t do we’ll keep all on firing into ’em till they follow the road that’s been took by their jolly-boat.’
His long face was purple with temper and the effort of shouting, and he turned it upon Wilfrid, who nodded a fierce excited approval, whilst I cried, ‘That’s it, that’s it; they must take him.’
Crimp held up his hand in token of having heard the captain, then seated himself; the oars fell and flashed as they rose wet to the sun, every gold-bright blade in a line, and the foam went spinning away from the bows of the little craft in snow to the magnificent disciplined sweep of those British muscles. In a jiffy she was on the brig’s quarter, with Crimp erect in her, gesticulating to the crowd who overhung the rail. I kept the telescope bearing on them, and it seemed to me that the whole huddle of them jabbered to Crimp all together, an indistinguishable hubbub, to judge from the extraordinary contortions into which every individual figure flung itself, some of them going to the lengths of spinning round in their frenzy, whilst others leapt upon the rail and addressed the boat’s crew with uplifted arms, as though they called all sorts of maledictions down upon our men. This went on for a few minutes, then I saw the bow-oar fork out his boat-hook and drag the boat to the main channels into which, all very expeditiously, two or three brawny pairs of arms lifted the red-capped man. Then four of our fellows sprang into the chains, handed the little creature over the rail and let him drop in-boards. They then re-entered their boat and fell astern of the brig by a few fathoms, holding their station there by a soft plying of oars, Crimp’s notion probably being, as ours was indeed, that the Portuguese crew would presently send our friend the red-cap to follow his mate.
We waited, watching intently. On a sudden I spied the red-cap in the heart of the mob of men that had clustered again near the wheel. His gesticulations were full of remonstrance; his people writhed round about him in the throes of a Portuguese argument, but it seemed to me as I followed their gestures and their way of turning their faces towards us, that their talk was all about our schooner, as though indeed their mutinous passions had been diverted by our cannon-shot in a direction that boded no particular evil to the red-capped man.