He continued to listen with increasing eagerness and agitation, cracking his joints again and again, while he advanced his head, setting his mouth in the form of a half-arrested yawn. When I had ceased he nodded repeatedly, maintaining silence, with a face that seemed to mark him too full for utterance. He, then, in stammering and choking voice, exclaimed, while a grotesque smile touched his countenance into a dim intelligence, even as the eastern obscurity is tinctured by the lunar dawn:
“Master, I sees yer meaning. I aint on the side where the gibbet is. I would sail round the world with you, master.”
Twenty minutes later he followed me out of my berth, and went on deck to fetch the cabin supper from the galley.
“Are you satisfied?” said the lady Aurora, who was seated at the table.
“Perfectly,” I answered.
CHAPTER XXIX.
AMSTERDAM ISLAND.
I had hoped to make the Island of Amsterdam next day; had the wind prospered we should have sighted it according to my reckoning; but in the morning watch, a little after daybreak, the breeze fell, shifted, and came on to blow ahead in hard rain squalls.
Yan Bol aroused me. I was sleeping soundly. I had been busy throughout the long night—busy after a manner of secrecy that had rendered my toil not less exhausting to my mind than to my body. Throughout the night I had been occupied with the boy Jimmy in paying furtive visits to the magazine, and with the help of the lad I had stowed away in a cabin locker a few round shot, cartridges for the long gun aft, some canister, pistols which I had loaded, and to whose primings I had carefully looked, a few brace of handcuffs, and some bilboes or legirons, such as Greaves had obliged Mr. Van Laar to sit in.
This work had run into hours, because I had to await opportunities to carry it on—the changes of the watch, men’s movements above—and throughout it was the same as though a musket had been leveled at my head, so frightful was the peril, so deadly the consequences of detection. For besides the risk of my movements aft exciting attention, there was the chance of Jimmy being missed forward. Luckily he was what is termed at sea “an idler,” and an idler at sea has “all night in.” No man can tell by merely looking at a hammock whether it is occupied or not, and I counted upon such of the men as might give the lad a thought believing that he lay buried in his canvas bag in the eyes of the brig.
Yan Bol aroused me. I went on deck and found a sallow, roaring, wet morning. The brig was heading points off her course, bursting in smoke through the headlong leap of the surge, with the topsail yards on the caps, reef tackles hauled out, a number of men rolling up the mainsail, and two on the main and two on the fore struggling with the wet, bladder-like topgallant sails.