Captain Margaret had planned to arrive at Jamestown early in the season, so that he might secure the cream of the tobacco crop before the summer fleet came in. Now that he was safe for a little while, he set about his business. At the end of the fifth day he chartered a couple of swift sloops from a Jamaica merchant, and loaded them, in one day, under official supervision, with fifty tons of assorted goods. He kept some twenty seamen at the work, from turn-to time till sunset, driving them himself. His zeal startled all of them. But Margaret was working with his whole nature to save the merchants who had fitted him out. He felt that he had risked their money, by gratifying a foolish whim; now he was to save them, having seen his chance. The bales and casks swung up out of the hold into the sloops. The winches clanked, the ropes creaked, the bosun swore at the slingmen. The slingmen, dripping in the hot darkness, damned and spat, and worked their hands full of splinters. A fine dust rose up out of the hatch to quiver in the sunlight. The slings fell with a rattling thud on to the boxes below; the block creaked as the fall was overhauled; a thirsty throat called “Hoist.” The bosun, too hurried to pipe, bent over the coamings to spit, telling the men on deck to hoist or sway away. Up came the boxes and casks, swinging to the yard-arm tackle. The boatswain, bearing them over, swearing, followed them to the rail, as the yard-arm was rounded in. Then there came the “High enough. Walk back”; and the sling strained slowly downwards to the stevedores, whose black skins gleamed in the sun. By sunset the sloops were cast off from the _Broken Heart_. Cammock and Margaret swung themselves into the stern of one of them as she sheered out. The slingmen, relieved from their hell below, stared at them silently over the rail with grime-ringed eyes. The sweat had streaked the dirt on their faces, making them look haggard. Like a row of corpses, dug up after the first day of burial, those silent men stood. Margaret, looking at them, thought with horror that the lives of some men might be expressed, defined, summed, in a sort of purser’s tally: so many boxes hoisted out, so many creatures killed, so many pots drunk, so many books read: with the sum added, the life extinct, nothing remaining, nothing for God or the Devil; merely a sum in addition for the harping quirers.