‘Here’s a mess to be in!’ grumbled Johnson. ‘It’s all very well to shoot or be shot at if you make butchery a profession. But to be maimed or killed in some cheap affray--having to fight for people you don’t care a hang about--obliged, for instance, to jeopardise your eyes, your limbs, perhaps your very existence, for an old woman like Mrs. Bannister, when the business is not in one’s line at all--’ He clenched his fist, and fetching his thigh a whack with it, exclaimed: ‘Let little hectoring Colonel Cock-a-doodle-doo cut as many throats as he can come at--I am a man of peace. I have parted with a large sum to get to India in comfort; and to expect me to help the sailors to fight is as monstrous as to look to me to assist them in furling the sails and scrubbing the decks.’ Thus speaking, he followed Mr. Emmett down on to the quarter-deck. CHAPTER XII A STORM OF WIND The atmosphere now took a deeper tinge of gloom. Thunder had followed the blaze of lightning in the west, low, distant, but continuous, like a rapid succession of the batteries of several ships of war heard from afar; and as the echoes of this ominous growling swept to our ears over the glass-smooth heave of the swell, the fresh dye of gloom came into the day and made an evening darkness of the afternoon. The noise of the thunder had been like calling a hush upon the ship. The men hung in silent groups along the decks; motionless at the wheel was the tall form of a powerful sailor gripping the spokes with an iron clutch that was scarcely to be shaken by the frequent hard drag of the tiller-gear to the kick of the rudder; the seamen stationed at the guns aft stood with folded arms or hands carelessly thrust into their pockets gazing at the brig, or, with the impatient looks of sailors kept idly waiting on deck during their watch below, directing glances at the horizon or the sky, as though in search of some sign of wind. The three mates continued to overhang the rail near the captain, who walked the length of a plank to and fro with a telescope under his arm, which he would sometimes level at the brig, afterwards addressing his officers in a low voice. All the ladies were below; but shortly after Mr. Johnson had left me, Miss Temple came on deck and went to the side to look at the stranger, and there lingered, with her gaze upon the western sky, over which the lightning was now running in fluid lines, a cascading of fiery streaks with a frequent dull opening blaze low down, which the heads of the swell would catch and mirror as though it were an instant gleam of sunset. Had she condescended to glance my way, I should have joined her. She loitered a while, and then left the deck; and at the same moment the second-mate came forward to the break of the poop and called out an order for the foresail and mizzen topsail to be furled and the foretopsail to be close reefed.