“All this makes me feel your confidence in me the more flattering, sir,” said I.
“Don’t over sir me. I must replace a guzzling and gorging baboon of a Dutch mate—a worthless mass of unprofessional fat—I must replace this hogshead of lard by a man, and Galloon finds me the man I need lying half-drowned off Ramsgate. I want him very earnestly, very imperatively. I must have a mate—a smart, English seaman. Here he is; but how am I to keep him? He is not going to be detained by vague talk of a voyage whose issue I decline to say anything about, whose motive is mysterious—criminal, for all he is to know—imperiling the professional reputation of those concerned in it, with such a gibbet as that which stands upon the sand hills at the end of it all. No; to keep you I must be candid, or you wouldn’t have stayed.”
“That is true.”
“See to the brig, Fielding. She’s a fine boat, don’t you think? If she didn’t drag so much water—look at that lump of sea on either quarter—she’d be a comet in speed. Why the deuce don’t the shipwrights ease off when they come aft, instead of holding on with the square run of the butter-box to the very lap of the taffrail?”
He looked aloft; he looked around the sea; he walked to the binnacle and watched the motion of the card; he then went below.
It was nearly dark. The red was gone out of the west, but the dying sheen of it seemed to linger in the south and east, whither the shapeless masses of shadow were flying across the pale and windy stars, piling themselves down there with a look of boiling-up, as though the rush of vapor smote the hindmost of the clouds into steam.
Why, thought I, it was but a day or two ago that I, mate of the Royal Brunswicker, was conning that ship, with her head pointing t’other way, in these same waters; and then I was thinking of Uncle Joe, and of some capers ashore, and of the relief of a month or two’s rest from the derned hurl of the restless billow, as the poets call it, with plenty of country to smell and fields to walk in, and a draught of new milk whenever I had a mind. Only a day or two ago—it seems no longer. Insensibility takes no count of time. In fact, whether I knew it or not, I went to sea again on this voyage on the same day on which I arrived in the Downs, after two years of furrin-going. How will it end? I shall become a fish. But six thousand pounds, thought I, to be picked up, invested, safely secured betwixt this and next May, I dare say! Oh, it’s good enough—it’s good enough; and I whistled through my teeth, with a young man’s light heart, as I walked, watching the brig closely, nevertheless, and observing that the fellows at the helm kept her before it, as though her keel was sweeping over metal rails.
CHAPTER X.
WE TRANSHIP VAN LAAR.
It blew fresh all that night and all next day. I was for carrying on, and shook a reef out of the forecourse and set the topgallant sail; and when Greaves came on deck he looked up, and that was all. He would not trust the brig with too much sail on her in a staggering breeze when Van Laar had charge of the deck; but he trusted her now, and trusted her afterward to Yan Bol when he came to relieve me; and hour after hour the Black Watch stormed along, bowing her spritsail yard at the bowsprit’s end into the foam of her own hurling till it was buried, and every shroud and backstay was as taut as wire, and sang, swelling into such a concert as you must sail the stormy ocean to hear, with a noise of drums rolling through it out of the hollow of the sails, and no lack of bugle notes and trumpeting as each sea swept the brig to its summit.
On the third day the weather was quiet. It was shortly before the hour of noon. A light swell was flowing out of the north, but the breeze was about northwest, and the brig was pushing through it under studding-sails. The men were preparing to get their dinner, one of the Dutch seamen at the wheel, and Greaves and I standing side by side, each with a quadrant in his hand.