“It’s the Governor,” said the skipper “He’s been selling her on the instalment plan.” “Let’s go up with spanners and shovels, and kill ’em all,” shouted the crew. “Let’s drown him, and keep the woman!” “Then we’ll be shot by that black-and-tan regiment—_our_ regiment. What’s the trouble ashore? They’ve camped our regiment on the beach.” “We’re cut off; that’s all. Go and see what they want,” said Mr. Wardrop. “You’ve the trousers.” In his simple way the Governor was a strategist. He did not desire that the crew of the _Haliotis_ should come ashore again, either singly or in detachments, and he proposed to turn their steamer into a convict-hulk. They would wait—he explained this from the quay to the skipper in the barge—and they would continue to wait till the man-of-war came along, exactly where they were. If one of them set foot ashore, the entire regiment would open fire, and he would not scruple to use the two cannon of the town. Meantime food would be sent daily in a boat under an armed escort. The skipper, bare to the waist, and rowing, could only grind his teeth; and the Governor improved the occasion, and revenged himself for the bitter words in the cables, by saying what he thought of the morals and manners of the crew. The barge returned to the _Haliotis_ in silence, and the skipper climbed aboard, white on the cheek-bones and blue about the nostrils. “I knew it,” said Mr. Wardrop; “and they won’t give us good food, either. We shall have bananas morning, noon, and night, an’ a man can’t work on fruit. _We_ know that.” Then the skipper cursed Mr. Wardrop for importing frivolous side-issues into the conversation; and the crew cursed one another, and the _Haliotis_, the voyage, and all that they knew or could bring to mind. They sat down in silence on the empty decks, and their eyes burned in their heads. The green harbour water chuckled at them overside. They looked at the palm-fringed hills inland, at the white houses above the harbour road, at the single tier of native craft by the quay, at the stolid soldiery sitting round the two cannon, and, last of all, at the blue bar of the horizon. Mr. Wardrop was buried in thought, and scratched imaginary lines with his untrimmed finger-nails on the planking. “I make no promise,” he said, at last, “for I can’t say what may or may not have happened to them. But here’s the ship, and here’s us.” There was a little scornful laughter at this, and Mr. Wardrop knitted his brows. He recalled that in the days when he wore trousers he had been Chief Engineer of the _Haliotis_. “Harland, Mackesy, Noble, Hay, Naughton, Fink, O’Hara, Trumbull.” “Here, sir!” The instinct of obedience waked to answer the roll-call of the engine-room. “Below!” They rose and went. “Captain, I’ll trouble you for the rest of the men as I want them. We’ll get my stores out, and clear away the shores we don’t need, and then we’ll patch her up. _My_ men will remember that they’re in the _Haliotis_,—under me.”