"You're hangin' on a tidy bit about them there boats. What do you think?"
"I suppose my life is as good as yours, and that I have a right to find out how we are to abandon this ship and make the shore," I answered, with some show of warmth, my object being to get all the information from him that was possible to be drawn. "You'll get the long-boat alongside, and all hands will jump into her? Is that it?"
"Why, wot do you think we'd get the boat alongside for if we didn't get into her?" he replied, with a kind of growling laugh.
"Will anybody be left on the ship?"
"Anybody left on the ship?" he exclaimed, fetching a sudden breath: "Wot's put that in yer head?"
"I was afraid that that yellow devil, the cook, might induce you to leave the steward behind to take his chance to sink or swim in her, just out of revenge for calling bad pork good," said I, fixing my eyes upon him.
"No, no, nothen of the sort," he replied quickly, and with evident alarm. "Curse the cook! d'ye think I's skipper to give them kind o' orders?"
"Now you see what I am driving at," I said, laying my hand on his arm, and addressing him with a smile. "I really did think you meant to leave the poor devil of a steward behind. And what I wanted to understand was how you proposed to manage with the boats to prevent him boarding you—that is why I was curious."
The suspicious ruffian took the bait as I meant he should; and putting on an unconcerned manner, which fitted him as ill as the pilot jacket which he had stolen from the captain he had murdered, and which he was now wearing, inquired, "What I meant by that? If they left the steward behind—not that they was goin' to, but to say it, for the sake o' argyment—what would the management of the boats have to do with preventin' him boardin' of them? He didn't understand."
"Oh, nothing," I replied with a shrug. "Since we are to take the steward with us, there's an end of the matter."