The Mutineers Part 2

Although Mr. Thomas obviously shared the opinion of the men, there was so little on which to base a charge of insubordination or affront that he momentarily hesitated.

"What is your name?" he suddenly demanded.

"Kipping, sir," the mild man replied.

This time there was only the faintest suggestion of the derisive inflection. After all, it might have been but a mannerism. The man had such a mild face and such a mild manner!

"Well, Kipping, you go about your work, and after this, let me warn you, keep busy and keep a civil tongue in your head. We'll have no slick tricks aboard this s.h.i.+p, and the sooner you men realize it, the easier it will be for all hands."

Turning, the mate went back to the quarter-deck and resumed his station by the weather rail.

While his back was toward us, however, and just as I myself, who had listened, all ears, to the exchange of words between them, was turning to the forecastle, I saw--or thought I saw--on Kipping's almost averted face just such a leer as I had seen him cast at the captain, followed, I could have taken my oath, by a shameless wink. When he noticed me gazing at him, open-mouthed, he gave me such another cold stare as he had given me before and, muttering something under his breath, walked away.

I looked aft to discover at whom he could have winked, but I saw only the second mate, who scowled at me angrily.

"Now what," thought I, "can all this mean?" Then, being unable to make anything of it, I forgot it and devoted myself industriously to my own affairs until the hoa.r.s.e call of "All hands on deck" brought the men who were below tumbling up, to be summoned aft and addressed by the captain.

Apparently Captain Whidden was not aware that there was a soul on board s.h.i.+p except himself. With his eyes on the sea and his hands clasped behind him, he paced the deck, while we fidgeted and twisted and grew more and more impatient. At last, with a sort of a start, as if he had just seen that we were waiting, he stopped and surveyed us closely. He was a fine figure of a man and he affected the fas.h.i.+ons of a somewhat earlier day.

A beaver with sweeping brim surmounted his strong, smooth-shaven face, and a white stock, deftly folded, swathed his throat to his resolute chin. Trim waistcoat, ample coat, and calmly folded arms completed his picture as he stood there, grave yet not severe, waiting to address us.

What he said to us in his slow, even voice was the usual speech of a captain in those times; and except for a finer dignity than common, he did not deviate from the well-worn customary phrases until he had outlined the voyage that lay before us and had summed up the advantages of prompt, willing obedience and the penalties of any other course. His tone then suddenly changed. "If any man here thinks that he can give me slovenly work or back talk and arguing," he said, "it'll be better for that man if he jumps overboard and swims for sh.o.r.e." I was certain--and I still am--that he glanced sharply at Kipping, who stood with a faint, nervous smile, looking at no one in particular. "Well, Mr. Thomas," he said at last, "we'll divide the watches. Choose your first man."

When we went forward, I found myself, as the green hand of the voyage, one of six men in the starboard watch. I liked the arrangement little enough, for the second mate commanded us and Kipping was the first man he had chosen; but it was all in the day's work, so I went below to get my jacket before eight bells should strike.

The voices in the forecastle suddenly stopped when my feet sounded on the steps; but as soon as the men saw that it was only the boy, they resumed their discussion without restraint.

"I tell you," some one proclaimed from the darkest corner, "the second mate, he had it all planned to get the chief mate's berth this voyage, and the captain, he put him out no end because he wouldn't let him have it.

Yes, sir. And he bears a grudge against the mate, he does, him and that sly friend of his, Kipping. Perhaps you didn't see Kipping wink at the second mate after he was called down. I did, and I says to myself then, says I, 'There's going to be troublous times ere this voyage is over.' Yes, sir."

"Right you are, Davie!" a higher, thinner voice proclaimed, "right you are.

I was having my future told, I was, and the lady--"

A roar of laughter drowned the words of the luckless second speaker, and some one yelled vociferously, "Neddie the fortune-teller! Don't tell me he's s.h.i.+pped with us again!"

"But I tell you," Neddie persisted shrilly, "I tell you they hit it right, they do, often. And the lady, she says, 'Neddie Benson, don't you go reckless on this next voyage. There's trouble in store,' she says.

'There'll be a dark man and a light man, and a terrible danger.' And I paid the lady two dollars and I--"

Again laughter thundered in the forecastle.

"All the same," the deep-voiced Davie growled, "that sly, slippery--"

"Hist!" A man raised his hand against the light that came faintly from on deck.

Then a mild voice asked, "What are you men quidding about anyway? One of you's sitting on my chest."

"Listen to them talk," some one close beside me whispered. "You'd think this voyage was all of life, the way they run on about it. Now it don't mean so much to me. My name's Bill Hayden, and I've got a little wee girl, I have, over to Newburyport, that will be looking for her dad to come home.

Two feet long she is, and cute as they make them."

Aware that the speaker was watching me closely, I perfunctorily nodded. At that he edged nearer. "Now I'm glad we're in the same watch," he said. "So many men just cut a fellow off with a curse."

I observed him more sharply, and saw that he was a stupid-looking but rather kindly soul whose hair was just turning gray.

"Now I wish you could see that little girl of mine," he continued. "Cute?

there ain't no word to tell you how cute she is. All a-laughing and gurgling and as good as gold. Why, she ain't but a little old, and yet she can stand right up on her two little legs as cute as you please."

I listened with mild interest as he rambled on. He seemed such a friendly, homely soul that I could but regard him more kindly than I did some of our keener-witted fellow seamen.

Now we heard faintly the bell as it struck, _clang-clang, clang-clang, clang-clang_. Feet scuffled overhead, and some one called down the hatch, "Eight bells, starbow-lines ahoy!"

Davie's deep voice replied sonorously, "Ay-ay!" And one after another we climbed out on deck, where the wind from the sea blew cool on our faces.

I had mounted the first rung of the ladder, and was regularly signed as a member of the crew of the Island Princess, bound for Canton with a cargo of woolen goods and ginseng. There was much that puzzled me aboard-s.h.i.+p--the discontent of the second mate, the perversity of the man Kipping (others besides myself had seen that wink), and a certain undercurrent of pessimism. But although I was separated a long, long way from my old friends in the cabin, I felt that in Bill Hayden I had found a friend of a sort; then, as I began my first real watch on deck at sea, I fell to thinking of my sister and Roger Hamlin.

CHAPTER III

THE MAN OUTSIDE THE GALLEY

Strange events happened in our first month at sea--events so subtle as perhaps to seem an unimportant part of this narrative of a strange voyage, yet really as necessary to the foundation of the story as the single bricks and the single dabs of mortar at the base of a tall chimney are necessary to the completed structure. I later had cause to remember each trivial incident as if it had been written in letters of fire.

In the first dog watch one afternoon, when we were a few days out of port, I was sitting with my back against the forward deck-house, practising splices and knots with a bit of rope that I had saved for the purpose. I was only a couple of feet from the corner, so of course I heard what was going on just out of sight.

The voices were low but distinct.

"Now leave me alone!" It was Bill Hayden who spoke. "I ain't never troubled you."

"Ah, so you ain't troubled me, have you, you whimpering old dog?"

"No, I ain't troubled you."

"Oh, no! You was so glad to let me take your nice dry boots, you was, when mine was filled with water."

The slow, mild, ostensibly patient voice could be none other than Kipping's.

"I had to wear 'em myself."

"Oh, had to wear 'em yourself, did you?"

"Let go o' my arm!"

"So?"

"Let go, I tell you; let go or I'll--I swear I'll hammer you good."

"Oh, you'll hammer me good, will you?"