'Isn't there no port to which we could carry this craft and dispose of her, and then disperse?' said Allan, the cook. 'She might go for a song, for me. We only want our wages.'
'Where's the port without a fired consul?' said Maul. 'I'll tell ye what 'd happen: they'd ask questions, a file of soldiers 'ud come aboard, us men 'ud be marched off into a fortress, and lie in cells fourteen or twenty foot under the sea. There our beards would grow, our bones would wear out our shirts, and all the music ye'd get, mates, would be the clank of chains.'
'No port for me!' said Toole. 'I'm for kaping on the say, and being found in a situation of disthress.'
'We must agree to one yarn, and stick to it. What about the lady?' said Dabb.
'Do she know what's happened?' said Maul. 'How it came about, I mean? Then she couldn't say nothing agin our yarn.'
'Tell'e what, my lads,' said the boatswain, looking thoughtfully around him, 'I'm not at all sure that the right tack don't lie in our up and telling the truth, explaining how we was exasperated, and proving that the deaths was accidental.'
'You're a-going to prove nothing accidental out of that bloke's knife,' said Dabb, with a dry, uncomfortable laugh, nodding at Toole.
'As good an accident as Maul's murtherous belaying-pin, and be damned to ye!' exclaimed the Irishman. 'Brothers, I'm thinking Joe there would have me be the only hanged man of this company. Is that because I'm a furriner?'
His eyes, fiercely squinting, met in Dabb's hot face. The seamen began to cut up tobacco, and then they lurched to the galley to light their pipes. The boatswain, pipe in mouth, stood in the waist, looking round him and aloft.