"Better think a minute," said Captain Luke, speaking coolly enough, but still with an angry undertone in his voice. "I've made you a good offer, and I'm ready to stand by it. But if you won't take what I've offered you you'll take something else that you won't like, my fresh young man. In a friendly way, and for your information, I've told you a lot of things that I can't trust to the keeping of any living man who won't chip in with us and take our chances--the bad ones with the good ones--just as they happen to come along. You know too much, now, for me to part company from you while you have a wagging tongue in your head--and so my offer's still open to you. Only there's this about it: if you won't take it, overboard you go." I had a little gleam of sense at that; for I knew that he spoke in dead earnest, and that the mate stood ready to back him, and that against the two of them I had not much show. And so I tried to play for time, saying: "Well, let me think it over a bit longer. You said there was no hurry and that I might have a week to consider in. I've had only three days, so far. Do you call that square?" "Squareness be damned," rumbled the mate, and he gave a look aloft and another to windward--the breeze just then had fallen to a mere whisper--and took his hands off the wheel and stepped away from it so that he and the captain were close in front of me, side by side. I stood off from them a little, and got my back against the cabin--that I might be safe against an attack from behind--and I was so furiously angry that I forgot to be scared. "Three days is as good as three years," Captain Luke jerked out. "What I want is an answer right now. Will you join the brig--yes or no?" Somehow I remembered just then seeing our pig killed, when I was a boy--how he ran around the lot with the men after him, and got into a corner and tried to fight them, and was caught in spite of his poor little show of fighting, and was rolled over on his back and had his throat stuck. He was a nice pig, and I had felt sorry for him: thinking that he didn't deserve such treatment, his life having been a respectable one, and he never having done anybody any harm. It all came back to me in a flash, as I settled myself well against the cabin and answered: "No, I won't join you--and you and your brig may go to hell!" All I remember after that was their rush together upon me, and my hitting out two or three times--getting in one smasher on the mate's jaw that was a comfort to me--and then something hard cracking me on the head, and so stunning me that I knew nothing at all of what happened until I found myself coming up to the surface of the sea, sputtering salt-water and partly tangled in a bunch of gulf-weed, and saw the brig heeling over and sliding fast away from me before a sudden strong draught of wind. VI I TIE UP MY BROKEN HEAD, AND TRY TO ATTRACT ATTENTION