‘You’ll not take it amiss, Butler,’ said the mate, ‘if I ask what notions you’ve formed--what resolutions may have come into your head?’ ‘First, as to receiving them on board,’ said Tom, speaking quietly and leisurely, though there was a look in his face which put an accent and meaning into his words that the ear with the eyes closed would not have caught. ‘I must be out of sight. Glass may come off. I’ll lie up in my cabin, and sham indisposition. Should Glass come, I’ll talk to him in my berth. You’ll receive the men and attend to all that needs looking after until the islanders go and sail’s trimmed. I’ll then show myself.’ He looked at me as he said this, and smiled. ‘I quite understand,’ said Mr. Bates. ‘You can leave everything to me.’ ‘Bates, I would trust you with my life.’ He paused, with his eyes fixed upon the mate. ‘Afterward, you’re thinking?’ he continued. ‘Well, that may be as it shall turn out; but I’ve sworn this by my heart, by that lady there, and by my Maker, that, having them, I’ll not let go of them, Bates, till they’ve signed a declaration of my innocence and their own villainy, witnessed by all hands; that, having them,’ he repeated, with the blood mounting into his face and his eyes glowing as though he were in a high fever, ‘I’ll keep them on the high seas to give them time to sign; failing which I’ll hang them at the yardarms of this brig, though it should come to my going to the South Sea to find savages for their executioners.’ The fire, the passion, the intensity with which he spoke these words made his delivery tragically startling and impressive. Bates’s countenance fell; Will was pale and alarmed; my own spirit was in hot sympathy with Tom’s--I felt all his rage, and his resolution to give the two devils the alternative of confessing the truth or of being hanged worked in me like a strong and flaming drink, and ran my blood in fire to my very finger-ends. ‘You’re never in earnest, Butler?’ said the mate in a low voice. Tom scowled at him. ‘Why, man, consider; put your respectability on one side and reflect. Those two fellows swore me into jail, into the hulk, into the convict ship, into long months of association with felons, whose crimes--many of them--barely stopped short of murder. It is to their training of me they’ll owe their hanging, if it comes to it. They’ve made a devil of me. They shall find me a devil.’ Mr. Bates glanced at me somewhat nervously and said: ‘Well, Butler, first let’s get them: then we shall be sure they’re the men, and when we’ve got them we must hope they’ll confess.’ ‘They’ll not go out of this ship alive unless they confess,’ said Tom. ‘If they confess under terror will their confession help you, sir?’ said Will. ‘Johnstone is the son of a lawyer, Bates,’ said Tom. ‘But there’s good sense in the question, Butler,’ said the mate. ‘They may swear their confession was a lie, that they were forced into telling it by your threats to hang them.’