I continued to pace the deck a while musing on this man's version of the adventure. The morning opened wide and brilliant as the sun soared. Soon after daybreak the breeze freshened, and the waters were now streaming and arching into little heads of foam as they ran with it. Mariana came out of the cabin and was trudging forward when I called to him:
Instead of responding he shrugged his shoulders till the lobes of his long yellow ears rested upon them, proceeded to the galley and lighted the fire. I went a little way forward and called to the seamen, who at daybreak had risen from their squatting postures and now hung together talking in low voices. They approached me. There were four of them, Trapp, South, Butler, and Tubb; Scott still grasped the tiller till he should be relieved at four bells--that is to say, at six o'clock.
"Men," said I, "Don Christoval has asked me to take charge of this schooner. You may have heard him say so when he came aboard this morning."
"I shall want a mate," said I. "Butler, you filled that post under Captain Dopping. Will you take it afresh?"
"If I must, I must, sir," he answered gloomily. "No extra pay goes to the job, I suppose?"
"I can not tell you. Scott says that the lady's father behaved like a madman, and that you threatened him with your cutlass."
"That's true," answered Butler. "He called us pirates, and swore he'd have us hanged as pirates. I never was tarmed a pirate afore, and I lost my temper, but I did him no hurt."
"It's a job," exclaimed Tubb, "which I, for one, am sorry I ever meddled with. Yonder," cried he, pointing to the dim haze of land, "lies Captain Dopping, shot through the head. Had any man said it was a-going to come to _that_, I should have told the Don that _I_ wasn't one of the sailors he was looking out for."
"That's a bad part of it," said I, "perhaps the worst part. But another very bad part is the condition of the lady. She looked to me, as she lay in the cabin, as if she had been very roughly handled."
The ugly cook put his head out of the galley and stared at us. I called to him, in an angry voice, to bear a hand and get the men's breakfast, adding that they had been up all night and wanted the meal. "There's to be no loafing, no skulking, now, d'ye understand. We're too few as it is, and you're just one of those rusty pieces of old iron which want working up, Yankee fashion; so turn to, d'ye hear?" and I confirmed my meaning by a menacing inclination of the head. The ugly rogue vanished, but I could hear him muttering a number of Spanish oaths to himself.