The cool chatter of the officers upon light, frivolous topics filled me with wrath. I wanted to hear them talk of the shooting of the madman. But nothing was said. No reference was made to that strange, threatening stir which had been visible amongst the convicts, like the passing of a sudden darkness over a waving field of grain. The doctor was very stern. He ate little and talked seldom. Only once did I catch the least allusion to that morning’s bloody business. I was coming up from the pantry with some glasses, when I heard Captain Sutherland say, ‘By-the-by, how is the man that was knocked down?’ ‘All right again,’ answered the doctor. ‘He lay like a corpse,’ said the captain. ‘He was stunned,’ said the doctor. And then Captain Barrett spoke, and the subject was changed. I went forward that night after dark, when my work was done, knowing it was Will’s watch below, and wishful for a chat with him. He lay, smoking, upon a chest in his cabin, and an apprentice swung overhead in a hammock, with one leg dangling down. I could not converse before that fellow up there, though nothing would have been thought had I entered and sat down beside Will, for it was gone about that he knew me through his father having had mine for a client. He saw me by the light of the slush lamp that sootily burned against the bulkhead near the door, nodded, and, filling his pipe afresh, lighted it and lounged out. We leaned against the ship’s galley to leeward, where all was quiet. ‘What have you to tell me about this morning’s fearful job?’ said I. ‘A sweet experience for you, my honey,’ said he. ‘See what’s to be learned by stowing oneself away in a convict ship.’ ‘What will they do to the soldier who killed the man?’ ‘Do to him? Give him a stripe to wear on his arm when they get ashore.’ ‘It was a brutal murder!’ I exclaimed. ‘You say that because your sympathies are below. Duty’s no murder. The man obeyed orders, and very right orders they are. Let me tell you, my daisy, there’s a very considerable slice of hell stowed away under hatches in this ship; and if it wasn’t for the guffies, there’d be such a blaze as ’ud make you, for one, wish Stepney were closer aboard than it is.’ ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ said I, ‘that twenty soldiers in command of half a man and a puppy can keep two hundred and thirty desperate, fearless, crime-hardened ruffians under?’ ‘Two hundred and thirty! That figure counts Butler as one of the beauties, eh?’ said he, laughing. ‘But I answer yes; twenty soldiers can do it, backed, of course, by our machinery of barricades, manholes, and the rest of it, not to mention a moral influence that counts more usefully than a great gun loaded chock-a-block with scissors and thumbscrews.’ ‘If those convicts had found a leader to-day,’ said I, ‘they would have seized the ship.’ He turned his head about in the gloom to see if anybody was near.