“It may take you a day to dig your pit.”
“And b’raps two,” said he.
“You will load about four tons a journey.”
“Call her five,” said he.
Here I observed that Galen, Teach, and one or two others having observed the big Dutchman and me close and earnest, yet very audible in this talk, had approached with sneaking steps to within earshot, where they feigned to occupy themselves, one in coiling down a rope, another in dipping for a drink out of the scuttle-butt, and so on. This decided me to drop the subject.
I walked to a corner of the deck called the starboard quarter, and folding my arms leaned against the bulwarks. A dim and faint idea had come to me in those few instants of time when Yan Bol went forward and called out to his mates on the forecastle with his immense, hairy, square hand beside his mouth, and this idea had slightly brightened while I questioned him. It was an idea that would be quite glorious if successful; otherwise it would be a forlorn and beggarly idea, a treacherous, cut-throat idea, exactly fit to play my heavy stake of silver and the Spanish maid into the hands of the men, and to secure me the quickest exit that could be contrived by the knife or the yardarm.
Madam Aurora watched me. I wish you were a man, thought I. Are you a person to fail one in a supremely critical hour? You offered to stick three men in the back; have you the courage to stick one man face to face?
I regarded her steadfastly, reflecting. I better remember her on that particular afternoon than at any former time. Would you like to know how she was dressed? I will tell you exactly. She wore a seaman’s plain cloth jacket, fitted by her own hands to her figure; it sat well and was tight and comfortable for those latitudes. She wore the dress she had been clad in when we took her off the island; she had turned it, or in some fashion rearranged it, and it was no longer the hideous garment I had thought it. She wore a cloth cap; it sat like a turban upon her thick, black hair, and laugh now, if you will! she wore a pair of sailor’s shoes, whence you will guess that what grace of littleness she had, lay in those hands of hers I have admired so often. Not at all. Her foot was perfectly proportioned to her hand. She had small, delicately-shaped, highly-arched, and altogether lovely feet. The shoes she wore I had found in the second of the slop-chests; they were embellished with buckles; the Dutch shopman probably stowed them away by mistake; they might have been designed for some dandy lad of a Batavian quarter-deck; they were small, and small they must have been, for they fitted Aurora.
This is the picture of her as she sat, intently regarded by me, who lay against the rail with folded arms, deeply considering. Teach and the others had sneaked forward again. Bol stumped the weather gangway. He was usually respectful enough, whenever I came on deck, to carry his vast carcass to a humbler part of the brig than I occupied. Miss Aurora rose and walked up to me.
“What are you thinking about?” said she, speaking in her own way, a way I have not yet attempted to write, and shall not here give. “Do I look ill, that you stare at me?”