"Square things up, is it?" cried Blodgett. "The dirty villain would have us hanged at the nearest gallows for all his buttery words."
"Exactly!" Roger threw back his head. "And when we get to Salem, I can promise you there's no man here but will be better off for doing as he's done so far."
"But whar's all dat money gone?" the cook demanded unexpectedly.
At that moment my eye chanced to fall on the man from Boston, who was looking off at the island as if he had no interest whatever in our conversation. The circumstances under which he had stayed with us were so strange and his present preoccupation was so carefully assumed, that I was suddenly exceedingly suspicious of him, although when I came to examine the matter closely, I could find no very definite grounds for it.
Blodgett was watching him, too, and I think that Roger followed our gaze for suddenly he cried, "You there!" in a voice that brought the man from Boston to his feet like the snap of a whip.
"Yes, sir! Yes, sir!" he replied briskly.
"What are you doing here, anyway?" Roger demanded. The fellow, who had begun to assume as many airs and as much self-confidence as if he had been one of our own party from the very first, was sadly disconcerted. "Why I come over to your side first chance I had," he replied with an aggrieved air.
"What were you doing in the cabin when the natives were running all over the ship?"
The five of us, startled by the quick, sharp questions, looked keenly at the man from Boston. But he, recovering his self-possession, replied coolly enough, "I was just a-keeping watch so they wouldn't steal--I kept them from running off with the quadrant."
"Keeping watch so _nobody'd_ steal, I suppose," said Roger.
Suddenly my mind leaped back to the night when Bill Hayden had died, and the man from Boston had made that cryptic remark, to which I called attention long since. "He said he could tell something, Roger," I burst out. But Roger silenced me with a glance.
Turning on the fellow again, he said, "If I find that you are lying to me, I'll shoot you where you stand. What do you know about who killed Captain Whidden?"
For once the fellow was taken completely off his guard. He glanced around as if he wished to run away, but there was no escape. He saw only hostile faces.