“Fetch a lantern, one of you,” bawled Greaves; “curse that poultry! Who started them all? That row’s as bad as a flare if there’s anything near on the lookout for us.”
A lantern was brought and the glare of it disclosed the tall, muscular, knock-kneed form of the youth Jimmy, grasping by the neck a huge, long-legged, ostrich-shaped cock, of the kind known as Cochin China. The faces of the seamen crowding aft to hear and see showed past him in phantom countenances, contorted out of all resemblance to themselves by their grins and stare of expectation, and by the dim light that touched them, and by the deep darkness behind them.
“What have you got there?” cried Greaves.
“It’s the big cock, master. He’s croupy,” answered the lad in his imbecile voice, continuing to grasp the fowl so tightly by the neck that, croup or no croup, the thing hung silent, as though dead, save that now and again it would give an uneasy, sick, protesting flap of its wings. “He wasn’t well this afternoon no, master. I was passing the coop, when I heard him sing out, ‘Ship ahoy!’ and I stopped to listen, and he sung out, ‘Ship ahoy!’ again. He was standing on one leg and the skin of his eyes was half drawed down, and I speaks to the cook about him, who tells me to go and be d——d.”
“He gooms, captain, vhen I vhas busy mit der crew’s supper; I had shcalded myself. No vonder I spheaks short,” exclaimed the voice of the cook among the crowd behind the lad.
“Bear a hand with your yarn, Jimmy!” cried Greaves.
“Well, master, when I hears that we was hailed, I came out of the bows, where I was lying down, and I listened, and I hears nothing; but by and by the hail comes, and I says to myself, ‘Aint I heard that woice before?’ and I stands listening till it sounds again. ‘It’s old Chaney,’ says I, and steps aft to the hen-coop, knowing in what part he lodges, and here he is, master. Shall I wring un’s neck?”
“Cook,” exclaimed Greaves, “take that cock from Jimmy and put it back in its coop. Go forward, men, but keep your eyes lifting till this thickness slackens. That hail may have come from a cock with the croup, as the lad says, but all the same, be vigilant till we can use our eyes. There may be something damnably close aboard even while I’m talking.”
The men answered variously in their gruff voices, and the mob of them rolled forward and vanished in the deep obscurity. The lantern which had been brought on deck was again taken below, and all now being silent fore and aft, Greaves and I lay over the side, listening and straining our sight into the murkiness; but not a sound came off the sea. No sparkle anywhere showed the life of a lifted blade; no deeper dye of ink indicated the presence of anything betwixt us and the horizon.
For an hour Greaves and I patrolled the deck, talking over the cock with the croup, over false alarms at sea; taling about the preternatural hush and sepulchral repose of the night; and then we talked of the voyage, of the island, of the ship in the cave; and on such matters did we discourse. And while we were conversing—an hour having passed since the incident of the croupy cock—we heard afar the tinkling and musical, fountain-like rippling of water brushed by wind, and a few minutes later, a pleasant breeze was cooling our cheeks, steadying our canvas, and propelling the brig, whose wake, as it streamed from her, trailed like a riband of yellow fire, while the wire-like lines which broke from her bows shone, as though at white heat, with the beautiful glow of the sea. The wind polished the stars and cleansed the atmosphere till you could see to the gloomy line of the horizon. By midnight the moon was shining, the heavens were a deep blue, and Greaves had gone below, satisfied that the brig was the only object in sight within the whole visible compass of the deep.