I was always a tolerably quick hand at figures, and had soon completed my calculations, feeling as though I was at sea again in sober professional earnest. The captain worked with extraordinary gravity; his singular eyes overhung the paper without a wink, and his yellow countenance, with his blue chops and chin, wore the melancholy of a mute’s face, mixed with an indefinable quality of distress, as though his mental efforts were putting him to physical pain. We agreed to a second in our latitude, but differed in our longitude by something over seven miles.
‘You’ll be in the right, sir—you’ll be in the right!’ he cried, smiting the table with his fist. ‘It is clear you know the ropes, Mr. Dugdale. I’ll abide by your reckonings. And now I want ye to do me a further sarvice.’
‘What is that, captain?’ said I.
‘Well, ye may reckon, of course, that I can write,’ he answered; ‘but I never was topweight with my pen, as Jack says, nor, for the matter of that, was Chicken much of a hand. There was some words which he was always making a foul hawse of. Now, what I want ye to do, Mr. Dugdale, is to keep my log for me.’
‘All this,’ said I carelessly, yet watching him with attention, ‘is practically making a chief officer of me.’ He did not answer. ‘Of course, I don’t object,’ I continued, stimulated more perhaps by Miss Temple’s than by my own views, ‘to oblige in any possible manner a gentleman’——
‘I am no gentleman,’ said he, with a wave of the hand.
‘——to whom Miss Temple and myself owe our lives. But I may take it that it is thoroughly understood the young lady and myself are to quit your hospitable little ship at the first opportunity that may offer.’
He regarded me in silence for I should say at least a minute; I was positively beginning to believe that he had fallen dumb. At last he seemed to come to life. He nodded slowly three times and said very deliberately: ‘Mr. Dugdale, you and me will be having a talk later on.’
‘But good God, captain,’ cried I, startled out of my assumed manner of indifference or ease, ‘you will at least assure me that you’ll make no difficulty of transhipping us when the chance to do so occurs?’
He was again silent, all the while staring at me; and presently, in a deep voice, said, ‘Later on, sir;’ and with that stood up.