He stepped to the rail and said to the men, in French of course—but you shall be told what he said:
"The assassin is in this ship. He pretends that he sprang for his life; he killed my brother, our navigator, and would have consigned us, helpless, to the desolation of the sea."
He returned, and was followed by a howl of passion from the boat alongside.
All in a minute, and just as the man was posting himself again in dramatic attitude close to the murderer, the huge Newfoundland, with an indescribable roar of rage, sprang with the whole weight of his body upon the French mate, and bore him to the deck with a thump of lead, like the fall of a twelve-pounder ball, and they thought that the brute's teeth had met in the wretch's throat. Hardy and the captain made a rush and dragged the animal off the fallen man, and the captain, grasping the creature by the coat of his neck, hauled him, growling fiercely, to the companion, and drove him below.
The man rose; his nose was bleeding, and after he had run the length of his sleeve along it his face looked like a decapitated head placed on the upright body it had been struck from.
"I want to swing my yards," said Captain Layard. "I've been hove to all night through you. Take that man away; I don't parley-vous myself, and don't follow your talk. He'll navigate you home; he looks a good navigator." And he smiled with some sense of superiority of meaning, which made his face fitter for comedy than for the tragedy of this passage.
The French boatswain swept his hand with an infuriate motion toward the rail.
"If I go with this man he will kill me," said the blood-stained French mate.
"Not he. The ship wants a navigator," replied Captain Layard, with a cheerfulness supremely inconsequential.
"If you do not come," said the French boatswain, in his native speech, "I will call the men up, and they will throw you into the boat."