Captain Glew saw him coming, yet did not look towards him. On the contrary, he began to take sights. Yet, as though he carried a slip of looking-glass in the side of his nose, he saw the man approaching, and he did not want to see that the boatswain held, on a level with his face, a piece of meat at the end of his knife, to guess that his errand was thunder-charged with the old-fashioned forecastle growl. The captain's face was incapable of any play of expression. It was hard beyond the holding of any further meaning the man's spirit or heart could put into it. But his eyes could look all the abominations of a tyrannical soul; and when he perceived the boatswain approaching, his right eye gazed with a devilish malice at the sun through the little telescope attached to his sextant.
Many minutes passed before he heeded the man, who had drawn close and stood waiting to be noticed. A huddle of heads, all looking in one direction, with but one leg exposed, as though the crew had been changed into one of those many-headed giants you read of in fairy tales, embellished the deck-house door. The red-faced mate stood near the helm. Presently, the captain, with his eye still gummed to his sextant, seemed to see the man.
'What d'yer want, Jones?'
'I'd like yer to taste this piece of meat, sir. It isn't fit food for men.'
Captain Glew slowly let his sextant sink from his eye, and exclaimed:
'Jones, I shipped you for a respectable, quiet sailor. This is a gentleman's yacht. Don't disturb our quiet by anything in the South Spainer or Cape Horn way.'
'Yacht or no yacht, cap'n, this is strong meat, killed diseased; the sorter stuff, if consumed, to lay the whole ship's company low with the sickness the beast died of. Smell of it.'
He offered the knife, with the pork on it, to the captain.
'The fault is in the cooking,' said the captain; 'it always is; it always will be. Go and growl to Allan.'