The little ship lay nearly becalmed. The sails swayed idly, fanning sweet draughts athwartships. The boatswain walked to the binnacle, and said, after looking at the card:
'There's no call now, Mike, to keep her heading for the Equator. I'm for giving my stern to this here boiling.'
'What's settled?' said Scott.
'Nothing.'
'I don't see,' said the man irritably, 'how anything's to be settled in this here roasting heat, and them two bodies side by side there. Him in the cabin's alone enough to take the curl out of a man's spirit. To think of him, with half a fathom of death, blue as ink, across his brow, and himself a-walking these very decks but just a little while gone! Three! It's too many!'
'One was the Dutchman's job,' answered the boatswain. 'But see here! Are ye afraid?'
'Afraid o' what?'
'Well, only that you're talking as if the ghosts of them bodies had jockeyed the yard-arms of your mind, and was close reefing your intellect.'
'I don't like dead bodies,' said Scott; 'and of all the dead bodies a-going,' he added, with a countenance of gloomy ferocity, 'the least I like is murdered bodies. Why don't ye get 'em cleared out overboard, Jim, and sweeten the little hooker? Do human blood smell? Something that my nose never tasted afore came along not long since in a breath o' wind.'