‘How they’re driving her! Our escape has woke them up! There’s fear and there’s meaning, too, in that press. Where are they bound to, and who’s to carry them there? Are they lying drenched and drugged and damned again as last night, thick as poisoned rats one atop of another? Oh, the beasts!’
‘I guess what’s happened,’ said the mate, in a gloomy voice. ‘That chap with a cast eye, who put the scheme of the Pacific Islands into their heads, has taken charge of the ship. There’s a sailor’s hand in that spread of cloths. Butler, they’ll know where they started, from what you told them; that cast-eyed rogue’ll heave the log and plump foul of what’s nearest and split. Lord, what a beautiful ship to run away with! And they’ll lose her, they’ll lose her!’
‘They’re steering straight for Tristan d’Acunha,’ said I.
‘Aye, straight as a fly crawls up a pane of window!’ exclaimed Tom. ‘She’ll make no Tristan. They’ll head off for the Horn, and continue their navigation with a chart they can’t read and a dirty forefinger.’
‘If Barney Abram but knew we were in this brig!’ I exclaimed.
Tom left the top of the deck-house and let go the maintopsail halliards. The big sail bellied out from the yard on the cap, losing its driving power, and in a few moments the brig’s pace sensibly diminished.
‘Let her get out of sight,’ said he, returning. ‘There’s no horizon wide enough to divide us. Why, Bates, think of daylight coming along and a stark calm falling, and yonder ship of devils, with Nick at the helm and Barney at the prow, lying stagnant within an easy boat-row!’
‘Here’s a wind to blow her clear of us, sir,’ said the mate.
They continued to talk; I, with my eyes fastened upon the fading shadow, sank into deep thought. Was that ship out there the vessel Tom and I and Will had boarded in the East India Docks? Was she the craft into whose black-hole under the forecastle I had crept, when all was silent in her prison ’tweendecks, while she lay at rest alongside the Warrior hulk? Was she the theatre of the tragedy of the convicts’ uprisal, of their nightmare carousals? Was it yonder shadow fast blending with the gloom upon the waters, whose fabric had re-echoed the obscene songs, the blasphemous jokes, the insane yells of the self-freed felons?
No more for a time than a wonderful horrible dream did it all seem to me as I stood looking—a frightful vision from which I must awaken and find myself in my bed at home, starting up to grieve and yearn for Tom as of old, and saying to myself: This dream came to me by thinking, before I fell asleep, of what his life would be on board the convict ship and how I was to make sure of joining him in the country he was transported to.