‘What have you to tell me about this morning’s fearful job?’ said I.
‘A sweet experience for you, my honey,’ said he. ‘See what’s to be learned by stowing oneself away in a convict ship.’
‘What will they do to the soldier who killed the man?’
‘Do to him? Give him a stripe to wear on his arm when they get ashore.’
‘It was a brutal murder!’ I exclaimed.
‘You say that because your sympathies are below. Duty’s no murder. The man obeyed orders, and very right orders they are. Let me tell you, my daisy, there’s a very considerable slice of hell stowed away under hatches in this ship; and if it wasn’t for the guffies, there’d be such a blaze as ’ud make you, for one, wish Stepney were closer aboard than it is.’
‘Do you mean to tell me,’ said I, ‘that twenty soldiers in command of half a man and a puppy can keep two hundred and thirty desperate, fearless, crime-hardened ruffians under?’
‘Two hundred and thirty! That figure counts Butler as one of the beauties, eh?’ said he, laughing. ‘But I answer yes; twenty soldiers can do it, backed, of course, by our machinery of barricades, manholes, and the rest of it, not to mention a moral influence that counts more usefully than a great gun loaded chock-a-block with scissors and thumbscrews.’
‘If those convicts had found a leader to-day,’ said I, ‘they would have seized the ship.’
He turned his head about in the gloom to see if anybody was near.