Captain Glew saw him coming, yet did not look towards him. On the
contrary, he began to take sights. Yet, as though he carried a slip of
looking-glass in the side of his nose, he saw the man approaching, and
he did not want to see that the boatswain held, on a level with his
face, a piece of meat at the end of his knife, to guess that his errand
was thunder-charged with the old-fashioned forecastle growl. The
captain's face was incapable of any play of expression. It was hard
beyond the holding of any further meaning the man's spirit or heart
could put into it. But his eyes could look all the abominations of a
tyrannical soul; and when he perceived the boatswain approaching, his
right eye gazed with a devilish malice at the sun through the little
telescope attached to his sextant.
Many minutes passed before he heeded the man, who had drawn close and
stood waiting to be noticed. A huddle of heads, all looking in one
direction, with but one leg exposed, as though the crew had been changed
into one of those many-headed giants you read of in fairy tales,
embellished the deck-house door. The red-faced mate stood near the helm.
Presently, the captain, with his eye still gummed to his sextant, seemed
to see the man.
'What d'yer want, Jones?'
'I'd like yer to taste this piece of meat, sir. It isn't fit food for
men.'
Captain Glew slowly let his sextant sink from his eye, and exclaimed:
'Jones, I shipped you for a respectable, quiet sailor. This is a
gentleman's yacht. Don't disturb our quiet by anything in the South
Spainer or Cape Horn way.'
'Yacht or no yacht, cap'n, this is strong meat, killed diseased; the
sorter stuff, if consumed, to lay the whole ship's company low with the
sickness the beast died of. Smell of it.'
He offered the knife, with the pork on it, to the captain.
'The fault is in the cooking,' said the captain; 'it always is; it
always will be. Go and growl to Allan.'
'Is the rest of the pork to be like this?' said Jones, taking the dollop
off the point of his knife, and seeming to weigh it in the palm of his
gigantic, tar-stained hand.
'Go forward and finish your dinner, Jones, and leave me to get an
observation,' said Captain Glew, with a very forbidding glance.
He applied his sextant once more to his eye, walking a little way aft.
The boatswain stood looking from him to the piece of pork, and from the
piece of pork to him; then saying, 'There goes my dinner,' he jerked the
pale, rather bluish lump over the side, and rolled forward.
CHAPTER IV.
CAPTAIN MARY LIND.
Next day they broached a cask of beef for the forecastle. The meat
proved fairly sweet, and that and a kidful of currant-dumplings kept the
men quiet. But on the following day the bad pork was served out again.
Captain Glew refused to hear the boatswain on the subject, and those of
the men who could not swallow the meat made shift for a meal with
pea-soup and ship's biscuit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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