He caught at the word. “The old dodging Devil,” he screamed piercingly and burst into such a loud laugh as I had never heard before. It was a provoking, mocking peal, with a hair-raising, screeching over-note of defiance. I stepped back, utterly confounded.
Instantly there was a stir on the quarter-deck; murmurs of dismay. A distressed voice cried out in the dark below us: “Who’s that gone crazy, now?”
Perhaps they thought it was their captain? Rush is not the word that could be applied to the utmost speed the poor fellows were up to; but in an amazing short time every man in the ship able to walk upright had found his way on to that poop.
I shouted to them: “It’s the mate. Lay hold of him a couple of you. . . .”
I expected this performance to end in a ghastly sort of fight. But Mr. Burns cut his derisive screeching dead short and turned upon them fiercely, yelling:
“Aha! Dog-gone ye! You’ve found your tongues--have ye? I thought you were dumb. Well, then--laugh! Laugh--I tell you. Now then--all together. One, two, three--laugh!”
A moment of silence ensued, of silence so profound that you could have heard a pin drop on the deck. Then Ransome’s unperturbed voice uttered pleasantly the words:
“I think he has fainted, sir--” The little motionless knot of men stirred, with low murmurs of relief. “I’ve got him under the arms. Get hold of his legs, some one.”
Yes. It was a relief. He was silenced for a time--for a time. I could not have stood another peal of that insane screeching. I was sure of it; and just then Gambril, the austere Gambril, treated us to another vocal performance. He began to sing out for relief. His voice wailed pitifully in the darkness: “Come aft somebody! I can’t stand this. Here she’ll be off again directly and I can’t. . . .”
I dashed aft myself meeting on my way a hard gust of wind whose approach Gambril’s ear had detected from afar and which filled the sails on the main in a series of muffled reports mingled with the low plaint of the spars. I was just in time to seize the wheel while Frenchy who had followed me caught up the collapsing Gambril. He hauled him out of the way, admonished him to lie still where he was, and then stepped up to relieve me, asking calmly: