'Now,' he exclaimed, 'for a little wash after that job!' and he took a kettle of water off the stove and carried it to his cabin. His wife followed him.
They came back soon and we sat down at the table. Whilst we ate Mrs. Burke explained how her husband had attached a block to a beam in the forecastle and rove a rope through it with a hook at one end, and how, standing in the forecastle, she had hauled up the buckets as he filled them deep down in the forepeak.
I told them of the horrible rat I had seen.
'Don't let it scare you, miss,' said the captain. 'Rats at sea haven't the viciousness of the beasts ashore. They'll drown themselves in a man's savings of molasses. They'll creep into his bunk and nibble his toe-nails. That's about the worst that I can recollect. They may be destructive to ships and cargo, but they've got their instincts, and know when on the ocean they're dependent on sailors.'
He doubtless said this to hearten me. Mrs. Burke changed the subject by speaking of the melancholy appearance of the forecastle. The hammocks swung, she said, as though every one held a man; the sailors' chests were scattered about, there was a smell of tobacco in the place as though the sailors had scarcely extinguished their pipes. The captain had put out the forecastle lamp. It was alight when they entered. Not that it would have set fire to the ship. It was sputtering and smelling, with a thick coil of slush rank smoke spreading in a little cloud under the deck out of a small greasy flame.
'The silence is shocking,' she said to her husband. 'I looked to see the heads of men peering at me over the edges of the hammocks.'
'There may be heads of men nearer than we think,' said he. 'I'll give ourselves a chance this night.' He looked up at the clock under the skylight and seemed to calculate, and then said, 'The boat went swiftly. She may have run into the ken of the ship—some box-ended waggon of a south seaman, no doubt, slow as a baulk of timber working to windward on a two-knot tide.'
'What will you do?' said his wife.
'I'll send up a rocket occasionally. If she picks up our people she might stand down to look for us—she might. I'll do more,' he added after a pause. 'I'll give them a flare or anything else that may be a bright light to see us by—a lantern on the stump of the foremast, or, better still, under the bowsprit where it'll dance.'
'Can a hull like this remain long afloat?' said I.