'ALONG OF BILL.'
It was dark when the _Mowbray_ brought up. The Gravesend lights trembled
windily, and there was a dance of lanterns as of fireflies upon the
breast of the stream. Mr. Vanderholt had no intention of going ashore.
He had ordered Captain Glew to bring up off Gravesend to avoid the risks
of the navigation of the river in a dark night. It is not customary for
the skippers of yachts to dine with their owners, but Mr. Vanderholt,
who was a seaman at heart, who disliked forms and ceremonies, having
made up his mind on the matter, had, after speaking a few words to his
daughter, walked up to Captain Glew and expressed a wish that he would
eat with them at their table. Glew touched his cap without any
expression of surprise or emotion of gratitude. He appeared to receive
the courtesy as a command, to accept it as he would an order to get the
vessel under weigh or shorten sail.
At six o'clock the cabin bell was rung to call them to dinner. Mr.
Vanderholt and Captain Glew arrived from the deck, Miss Vanderholt from
her cabin. The interior was a pretty little picture of hospitality; two
handsome lamps shone purely and brightly. The burnished swing-trays
reflected the beams of the lamps. The light glanced dart-like in
polished bulkhead and mirror, and shone on silver and damask, and fruit
and crystal. The steward appeared with a dish of fish.
'I think you have a pretty good cook in this vessel,' said Vanderholt,
examining the fish, as he helped his daughter.
'He served his time in liners, and has done a deal of cooking at sea in
his day.'
'I hope he will take some trouble to please the men,' said Mr.
Vanderholt. 'It is always bad food for the forecastle, but a bad cook
makes bad bad indeed.'
'What do the men get to eat?' asked the young lady.
'The usual ship-going fare, miss,' answered Glew: 'pork, junk,
pease-soup, biscuit, and the like.'
'Who keeps the log of this ship?' said Mr. Vanderholt.
'I shall,' said the captain.
'What is a log?' inquired Miss Vanderholt.
'A book, my dear, in which the chief mate of a ship enters daily her
situation, the state of the weather, and such observations as he is
capable of making.'
'They are not many, or of a poetical order,' said Glew, with his faint
taut smile. 'The nearest romantic stroke that I can recollect was this
entry: "A dreadful day. At noon precisely the ship blew up, and nobody
was left but William Gibson."'
'I suspect, captain,' said Mr. Vanderholt, 'that you will have met with
some romantic traverses in your time?'
'I don't recall any,' answered the captain.
'Why, to put one instance as delicately as I can,' said Mr. Vanderholt,
filling a silver tankard till it foamed over with India pale ale; 'that
extraordinary affair of some early love.' Miss Vi looked extremely
confused, and gazed with entreaty at her father. 'The remarkable story,
I mean,' continued Vanderholt, bringing out his mouth and nose covered
with froth, 'that Mr. Fairbanks told me.'
'And what might the story be, sir?' said Captain Glew, looking blankly.
Miss Vanderholt continued to gaze with entreaty, whilst her father
repeated the story. Captain Glew drained his wine-glass, and uttered a
dismal laugh, in which his face bore no part.
'Why,' said he, 'that yarn's told of old Jim Dyson, old Captain Dyson,
who was found dead in his bed three years ago at the sign of the Sot's
Hole, down Limehouse way.'
Miss Vanderholt burst out laughing.
'I wonder Mr. Fairbanks should tell that yarn of me,' continued Captain
Glew. 'If my wife gets to hear of it--and there's trouble enough in
married life without lies----'
'So the bubbles break as quickly as they are blown,' said Mr.
Vanderholt. 'But I confess I never would have thought it of you, Captain
Glew.'
After dinner the father and daughter patrolled the deck, warmly wrapped.
Mr. Vanderholt smoked an immense pipe that curled from an amber tip at
his lips into a richly-bronzed and glowing bowl in his hand. It was
early night. The wind was gone, the stream of tide softly shaled along
the bends of the schooner in the note of surf washing on shingle heard
at a distance. How dismal, flat and gaunt looked the treeless Tilbury
shore in that sad light! The very stars shining over it seemed to
tremble with the spirit of mud and cold desolation. Shadowy shapes of
ships went by, sometimes to a sound of music, as of concertinas and the
like; tall phantasmal shapes, lifting spires as delicate as needles to
the stars, loomed anear and afar. In the main, silence lay upon that
river, with its burden of living freights.
The crew loafed about the schooner's deck forward, and the grumble of
their voices came aft, along with the scent of tobacco-smoke. They
slept in a deck-house, with three windows of a side, and spikes of light
shot from those windows, occasionally glancing on the figure of a
passing man, and falling in streams of radiance upon the bulwarks.
Besides this deck-house, the schooner owned a small forecastle,
containing three or four bunks.
'I don't know how it may be with you, Vi,' said Mr. Vanderholt, pressing
his daughter's arm affectionately against his side, 'but I give you my
word I feel better already.'
'That's a good thing,' exclaimed the young lady. 'I wish George were
with us.'
'George is not two men. He can't be in India and here at the same time.'
'He ought to be here, by my side,' said Miss Vanderholt. 'Oh, how
delicious the voyage would then be! I should not object to your sailing
round the world.'
'Make the youngster give up the army. He's got means of his own, and
_you'll_ be pretty well off, I hope,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'If you go
out to India I shall be alone, and you'll die of some distemper,
engendered by what is there called "a station." No good in titular
dignity. The land teems with captains and colonels; and a time may come
when a man will be respected because he is not a major-general. It would
be different if George was in the Dutch army.'
He was proceeding, when he suddenly stopped, catching a noise of oars on
the bow, and suddenly a long, sharp-stemmed boat, apparently a police
boat, shot out of the gloom, and a powerful voice hailed:
'Schooner ahoy!'
'Hallo!' answered Captain Glew, who was leaning over the side, at a
respectful distance from the father and daughter, furtively smoking a
cheroot.
'I want to come aboard of you.'
In a minute the boat was alongside, and a couple of men sprang over the
rail.
'What vessel's this?' said one of the men, who, like his companion, wore
a tall, glazed hat, and was swathed to the throat in overcoat and
shawls.
'The _Mowbray_, privately owned. What's your business?' said Captain
Glew.
'We're Bow Street officers. We're searching the shipping for a man
named Simmons. D'ye want to see our warrant?'
'What's he charged with?' said Mr. Vanderholt, coming with his daughter
on his arm from the other side of the deck.
'Murder!' was the answer.
Miss Vanderholt screamed. Her father said instantly:
'Search my ship by all means. I hope the man may not be on board of us.
If he is, I do not sail. Captain Glew, render these two officers every
assistance.'
The _Mowbray_ was a small vessel, and the search did not take long. The
hatches were lifted, the hold explored by lantern-light, the deck-house
was rummaged, the whole ship's company was mustered and severally
examined. It was strange to see those seamen standing in a line, with
the runners in their glazed hats flashing the light of their lanterns
over their rough, bearded, weather-blackened faces. They had assented
very easily to this mustering and examination, for the man was wanted
for murder, and the very name will subdue the roughest, and silence
those curses of the forecastle with which the two Bow Street fellows
were the sort of people to have been handsomely assailed by this crew,
had they bothered the men with a smaller errand.
They searched the cabins, and, lastly, they entered the little
forecastle in which no man had as yet slept. A hole of a seabedroom was
this. You could scarcely stand upright in it. The two men descended the
short ladder, and Captain Glew stood atop waiting. The bullies of Bow
Street swung their lamps carefully. Suddenly one of them, delivering a
low gasp, said: 'Catch hold of this light, Tom.' He dropped on his
knees, and grabbed at a leg, the foot of which dimly showed under one of
the bunks. He hauled with a will, and out came the body of a man or boy,
shrieking like a woman in a fit.
'Don't 'urt me! for God's sake, don't 'urt me, gemmen! I meant no 'arm.
It was all along of Bill.'
'Is that a woman you've got down there?' sung out Captain Glew.
'Nothing else, by the holy poker!' answered one of the officers, in a
voice that trembled with the temper of disappointment.
'Yes, I'm a girl, gemmen. It was all along of Bill. Put me ashore, and I
promise never to offend again,' cried the unfortunate little woman,
sobbing grievously.
Yet, bedraggled as she was, of a raw, uncouth, mixed look, with her
trousers and sailor's jacket, and plentiful black hair loosened by
dragging, she showed as a saucy, handsome wench, and the spirit of the
devil was in her black eyes when she looked at the Bow Street men.
They all went on deck.
'Thunder of heaven!' cried Mr. Vanderholt, in a voice of horror. 'The
murderer is on board our ship! They have got him. So,' he cried in a
voice deep with resolution, 'our voyage ends. To-morrow we return home.'
'It's a woman, sir,' said Captain Glew.
'A woman!' shouted Mr. Vanderholt. He quitted his daughter, and strode
straight up to the group as they came along, and, putting his face close
into the woman's, he exclaimed: 'What are you doing aboard my vessel?'
'It's all along of Bill!' cried the girl. 'I never meant no 'arm, and I
can't tell yer what I done it for.'
'Father,' said Miss Vanderholt, approaching the group, and taking a view
of the girl by the sheen that floated round about the lighted skylight,
'don't you think it's just possible that this person who's been in
hiding for some time may be a little bit hungry and thirsty? Ask her
into the cabin. She will tell us her story.'
'Oh, lady, you is kind!' exclaimed the girl, extending both hands
towards Miss Violet, and again beginning to cry bitterly.
'This way, then,' said Mr. Vanderholt.
The Bow Street gentlemen descended with the rest. Whether they imagined
a scent of crime in this female stowaway, or whether they distinguished
a scent of drink in the cabin atmosphere, cannot, after all these years,
be settled with any degree of certainty. They seated themselves, and Mr.
Vanderholt offered them drink, and they drank, eyeing the girl with very
knowing looks, whilst she told her story in a high, strained voice.
'What are ye?' began Captain Glew.
'I'm barmaid at the One Bell in Cable Street, nigh the London Docks.'
Here she paused, and looked at Miss Violet. The blood was red in her
cheeks, and her eyes were wild and wet with tears. Her aspect, in the
clear light of the lamp, was extraordinary. She seemed half a gipsy. Her
beauty was coarse and masculine; her hair, black as streaming ink, lay
upon her back in a wonderful quantity.
'It was all along of Bill,' she went on.
'Who's this bloomed Bill you've been talking about since you was lugged
out of it?' said one of the officers.
'The young man I keeps company with,' she answered. 'We fell out because
of a sailor man that's aboard this vessel. Fred Maul his name is, and it
'ud have been good for me this blessed night had they strangled him in
the hour of his coming into this blistered world. Why,' she cried,
turning upon Miss Violet, who shrank a little from the gathering
ferocity of the woman, 'this beast of a Maul comes and 'angs about me,
and Bill, he falls jealous. Bill and me 'ad a row over this 'ere Maul.
He says to me: "I know the ship he's signed for; yer'd better foller
him." "By God!" cries I, mad with feeling that _he_ oughtn't to have
said it, "say that again, and I'll do it." He says it again.' Here the
unfortunate woman raised her voice till the little cabin rang; but
though the gentlemen of Bow Street shouted, and though Captain Glew and
Mr. Vanderholt sought, with a hundred gestures, to subdue her voice,
nothing could soften the hysteric, piercing note. 'He s'ys it ag'in, I
s'y, and, going away, the unfeeling devil comes back arter ten minutes,
and chucks a bundle on to the counter, and says, with a low sneer:
"There's your kit. Now go and foller Bill."'
'And so here y'are,' said one of the officers. 'A tidy lot, I allow, for
a select hevening party. When I saw her boot, fired if I didn't think it
was a man.'
The girl bit upon a sandwich, and glared fiercely at the officers while
she chewed. Miss Violet, with the merciful heart of her sex, fetched
some hairpins from her cabin, and gave them to the girl, who, with a
curtsey, and a smile of shame and thanks, turned to a strip of mirror
and swiftly coiled her hair upon her head.
'Go and fetch the young lady's hat,' said Mr. Vanderholt to the steward.
The Bow Street gentlemen, having drunk their glasses of cold brandy and
water, got up, saying they must be off.
'Yer'll put me ashore, won't yer?' asked the girl.
'Ay, they'll put you ashore,' said Mr. Vanderholt, slipping a sovereign
into the hand of one of them; 'and here's for a knot of gay ribbons for
you, miss,' said he, laughing at the figure of the woman, 'when you're
clear of this spree, and in petticoats again.'
She thrust the sovereign into her breeches pocket, muttering 'Thank you,
sir,' whilst she scowled at the two officers.
'Come along, miss, if you're coming; for we're off,' said one of the
men.
The young woman followed them, gazing about her as she went as though
she had only just discovered that she was in a very richly-furnished
cabin, and in the presence of a gentleman and a very finely-dressed,
handsome young lady. She wore an expression that was like asking 'Where
am I? How did I get here? What's it about?' And then, pausing an instant
at the foot of the companion-steps, to look at Miss Violet, and say, 'It
was all along of Bill; but he'll get it 'ot when I meet him,' she went
up the ladder in the wake of Captain Glew.
'Let them get clear of the schooner,' said Mr. Vanderholt, casting
himself upon a sofa. 'They're not what you would call pickings from the
sweetest of the social orders.'
'What did she intend?'
'She couldn't have told you. When women of that sort go mad with
jealousy, "stand by," as Jack says. She'd have had Maul's life, perhaps,
before we were out of the Channel.'
He was interrupted by a great commotion on deck--loud cries of men,
mingled with the yells of a woman.
'Stop here, Violet!' cried Mr. Vanderholt; and he rushed up the steps.
The deck-house door was open. The light of the lantern streamed freely
into the air, and illuminated a considerable area of plank, in the midst
of which a fight was apparently going on, for it was thence the uproar
proceeded. Mr. Vanderholt ran forward, and saw the girl tearing with
outstretched claws at one of the men as though she would rend him in
pieces. His trouble was to get away. He butted and dodged behind his
elbow, shouting: 'S'elp me Bob, Polly, it worn't no fault o' mine'! And
then she would shriek out: 'Yer drove me to it! It was along o' you, and
not Bill, you sink----' And here she would nearly tear his ear off; and
then she got at his hair, whilst the man, never offering to hit her,
danced in the light, shouting with pain, and swearing that he had had
nothing to do with it.
'Stop it!' roared Captain Glew. 'Is a gentleman's yacht to be disgraced
by a stowaway spitfire? Help her into the boat, Mr. Officers;' and
plunging, they bore the girl out of her entangled embrace of Maul, and
in a few minutes they were over the side, and gone.
The crew followed Maul into the deck-house, and a grunt of laughter went
along with them.
'What have you been a-doing to her?' says one.
'Where's my 'at?' said Maul.
'What do it feel like, Frederick?' sung out a sailor named Legg. 'As if
you was married?'
'Never mind _her_. I'm a-thinking of what I've left behind me, my joys,'
exclaimed a seaman.
'I'm durned mighty glad I sold off all my furniture,' said the
deep-throated Jack who had on an early occasion made a statement on this
subject.
Father and daughter sat in the cabin till half-past ten. Miss Violet was
then sleepy, and went to bed. When she left her berth in the morning the
schooner was under weigh, storming through Sea Reach, with half a gale
of wind astern of her, and a thunderstorm of hell's own hue lancing the
land beyond Canvey Island with lightning that fell in showers of fiery
bayonets. It was a majestic, sublime, terrible storm. The girl, standing
in the companion-way, was fascinated. The sun peeped at a corner of this
purple-black bank of vapour, off which rags of tempest, gilded by his
radiance, were blowing sheer across the wind, whilst for miles the edge
of the electric mass was a line of glorious light. It was as though a
bed of fire lay on top, with the molten stuff darting in flames through
the swollen belly; and the thunder roared in rattling broadsides.
The noble, dangerous scene of sky, however, was soon far astern; and the
schooner sped on, carving out a grass-green comber with her chisel-like
stem, and leaving the tail of a comet blowing in froth behind her. And
now did nothing noticeable happen for some days. They met with heavy
weather in the Channel. The wind darkened with snow, and the _Mowbray_,
under small canvas, ratched, panting over the crazy, choppy sea behind
the Goodwins for a board that should open her a free run down the
English coast. Miss Violet was rather sea-sick. Strange to say, her
father was rather sea-sick, too.
'This motion,' he growled to Captain Glew, whilst he grasped a decanter
of brandy by the neck, 'is not an honest heave. I am a good sailor in
seas where the head and the stomach swing together, but when the stomach
leaps at the head, and the head darts back from the stomach, leaving a
sensation of brains in one's very toes, I give up.'
And so saying, he swallowed a glass of brandy, and lay down.
It was now that Miss Vi felt the want of a maid, or, at all events, of a
stewardess to attend upon her. But Vanderholt had been dogged and Dutch
in this matter when they had talked about the voyage at home. He would
have no women, he said; they would be going forward among the men, and
breeding trouble. Was it not good for Violet that she should learn to
help herself? Could not she do her own hair? Then let her cut it off; it
would be growing whilst they were away. These trifles illustrated Mr.
Vanderholt's eccentricities as a rich man, and Violet's submissiveness
as an only daughter.
However, the fine girl was not so ill but that she could manage for
herself. Her nausea had left her, whilst her father still lay grunting,
incapable of smoking, and gray as his beard. She waited upon him, and
stood upright with ease upon a bounding deck by his side, holding on to
nothing but her own hands. He rolled a languid eye of admiration over
her.
'I did not bargain for this,' said he, 'or, as God is my witness, we
would have joined the hooker at Plymouth.'
'Where are we now?'
'In the Chops, where the Channel always shows its teeth,' answered Mr.
Vanderholt, with an ashy grin of nausea.
Vanderholt need not have been ashamed. Nelson, whilst rolling in the
Downs, wrote with pathetic irritability to his Emma of his incessant
sickness. A man has stepped ashore after a voyage to Australia. Would
not you suppose him seasoned? Yet, on crossing the Channel in one of the
small steamers, he was more violently sick than the most prostrate of
the Frenchmen who lay in cloaks, with tureens by their sides, helpless
about the decks.
'There is the Bay of Biscay to come,' said Miss Violet, with a lurking
hope that, if her father's sickness continued, he would order Captain
Glew to steer for home again.
'Yes, it is not far off, and I hope it may blow a hurricane when we get
there, for then I shall be all right. I like a tall sea. Man and boy, I
never could stand these rugged little Channel tumblers. Call for the
steward, my dear. I want some tea.'
The old gentleman was not very accurate in his description of the state
of the ocean, nevertheless. A large and liberal sea was running
steadfast, in charging hills of green, which crumbled into foam. The
torn scud flew fast. Every hollow was the wide and seething valley of
Atlantic waters; and as the hull of the schooner sank into the trough,
you might catch in the noise of expiring spray, in the explosion of
coloured bubbles, winking like stars in beds of froth, a sound of
martial music.
The _Mowbray_ was making splendid weather of it. The wind was right
abeam. She took the seas in steady lifts and falls. Regularly as the
beat of a pulse, the hull would disappear. She seemed a foundered craft,
till, in a minute, up she'd soar, with marble-hard breasts of canvas,
leaping like some creation or possession of the deep to the height of a
surge, bursting the flickering green peak into smoke, which blew away in
rainbows whenever the sun rolled out of some solemn-sailing cloud under
which the scud was scattering like smoke.
It was half-past eleven o'clock in the morning. Captain Glew, coming
below for his sextant, looked in on Mr. Vanderholt, and exchanged a few
sentences with him touching affairs aboard. The schooner had been
liberally provisioned with fresh meat and loaves of bread for the
forecastle use, and, so far, the men had sat down to a fresh mess every
day. But carcasses and quarters, ribs and heads, and rumps must, unless
they are pickled, soon take a character to call 'avast,' even to a
sailor's appetite. Indeed, all the fresh meat was gone. It had been
eaten up.
It was the dinner-hour aboard the _Mowbray_--at sea, before the mast,
everybody used to sit down and eat his dinner by the sun, at the same
time, no matter in what ocean he floated--and three or four men were
gathered about the door of the little caboose, waiting to carry the kids
into the deck-house.
A hairy, tattooed lump of a man, named Simon Toole, after snuffling a
bit, exclaimed:
'If it's to be pay-soup, maties, at the rate of this smell, then I'll
tell yer a story it reminds me of. Micky M'Carthy was able seaman on
board a brigantine. She foundered in mid-ocean. They'd just time to
chuck something to eat and drink into her, and there they was, afloat
under a broiling sun. By-'n-by, wan of thim, feeling thirsty, goes for a
drink, and what d'ye think they found they had shipped for water, which
was all the drink, by gob, they had? Casther-oil, bullies! It was
Micky's doing. He had mustook breakers of oil for breakers of water, and
then, all hands feeling thirsty, they nearly kilt him.'
'Lads,' said a man named Dabb, 'now there's no fresh beef left, I'm
a-going to feel hungry.'
'That's nater,' exclaimed Toole; 'knock, and there ain't no room. It's
always t'other ways about in this world. What couldn't I sit down and
ate? Everything, bedad, but the stuff they're going to give me.'
'The capt'n looks plump,' said Dabb darkly, looking aft at Captain Glew,
who stood with a sextant upon the quarter. 'He's fed so well that I'm
gorged if he's left any room for a smile in his face.'
'I knew a skipper,' said the cook, lounging half out of the galley-door,
and plunging into the conversation a little irrelevantly, 'who used to
talk to his ship and his masts as if they was alive. He'd look up at his
maintaws'l, and say: "D'ye think you could stand it if I shook a single
reef out of yer? Why, then, all right"; and then he'd bawl out the order
to the men. Next he'd step back right aft, paying no heed to the fellow
at the wheel, and looking aloft, would say to his mizzen taws'l, "I
think a reef can come out of you, too. Does the mast feel equal to the
strain, d'ye think? Why, then, my lads, jump aloft, and shake a reef
out of the mizzen taws'l." He was a queer dawg,' continued the
cook--'fat as a slug, and as long in seeing a thing as a balloon's in
falling.'
Seeing the captain looking, he slunk back to his coppers.
Presently the pea-soup and pork were ready, the kids were filled, and
the hands went to dinner. They sat on sea-chests, the kids were upon the
deck, and the sailors plunged their sheath-knives into the pale, fat
lumps of meat, and took what they wanted, a few using tin dishes, and
some ship's biscuit, as trenchers.
'Blast me!' after a grim silence, presently exclaims James Jones, who
had shipped as boatswain and carpenter, 'if I don't think the Dutchman
has sneaked us aboard on the cheap. This here's no food for a man.'
He held aloft a morsel of pork, and squinted up at it.
'Yer taste'll grow,' said a sailor, with a sullen laugh. 'The flavour of
roast beef ain't out of your mouth yet, Jim.'
'He'll be a mean cuss,' said the boatswain, continuing to squint
dangerously at the piece of pork, 'if it's to be no better than this.'
'Here's the yarn of the meanest thing that ever was read of in books,'
said a seaman named Mike Scott. 'A man once said to me: "When I was a
boy, I stood at my father's gate, with a kitten on my shoulder. A man on
horseback stops and says: 'I likes to see little boys kind to animals.
Here's a farden for ye, sonny.'" And with that he gives him a button,
and then rides off. Who was it, d'ye think? Why, the Dook o'
Vellington.'
'Not a vord agin the Dook. He's my godfather,' said a man.
'I'm a-going to complain of this meat,' said the boatswain, starting up.
Retaining the piece on the end of his knife, he stepped out of the
house, and walked aft.
Captain Glew saw him coming, yet did not look towards him. On the
contrary, he began to take sights. Yet, as though he carried a slip of
looking-glass in the side of his nose, he saw the man approaching, and
he did not want to see that the boatswain held, on a level with his
face, a piece of meat at the end of his knife, to guess that his errand
was thunder-charged with the old-fashioned forecastle growl. The
captain's face was incapable of any play of expression. It was hard
beyond the holding of any further meaning the man's spirit or heart
could put into it. But his eyes could look all the abominations of a
tyrannical soul; and when he perceived the boatswain approaching, his
right eye gazed with a devilish malice at the sun through the little
telescope attached to his sextant.
Many minutes passed before he heeded the man, who had drawn close and
stood waiting to be noticed. A huddle of heads, all looking in one
direction, with but one leg exposed, as though the crew had been changed
into one of those many-headed giants you read of in fairy tales,
embellished the deck-house door. The red-faced mate stood near the helm.
Presently, the captain, with his eye still gummed to his sextant, seemed
to see the man.
'What d'yer want, Jones?'
'I'd like yer to taste this piece of meat, sir. It isn't fit food for
men.'
Captain Glew slowly let his sextant sink from his eye, and exclaimed:
'Jones, I shipped you for a respectable, quiet sailor. This is a
gentleman's yacht. Don't disturb our quiet by anything in the South
Spainer or Cape Horn way.'
'Yacht or no yacht, cap'n, this is strong meat, killed diseased; the
sorter stuff, if consumed, to lay the whole ship's company low with the
sickness the beast died of. Smell of it.'
He offered the knife, with the pork on it, to the captain.
'The fault is in the cooking,' said the captain; 'it always is; it
always will be. Go and growl to Allan.'
'Is the rest of the pork to be like this?' said Jones, taking the dollop
off the point of his knife, and seeming to weigh it in the palm of his
gigantic, tar-stained hand.
'Go forward and finish your dinner, Jones, and leave me to get an
observation,' said Captain Glew, with a very forbidding glance.
He applied his sextant once more to his eye, walking a little way aft.
The boatswain stood looking from him to the piece of pork, and from the
piece of pork to him; then saying, 'There goes my dinner,' he jerked the
pale, rather bluish lump over the side, and rolled forward.