'Where's the port without a fired consul?' said Maul. 'I'll tell ye what 'd happen: they'd ask questions, a file of soldiers 'ud come aboard, us men 'ud be marched off into a fortress, and lie in cells fourteen or twenty foot under the sea. There our beards would grow, our bones would wear out our shirts, and all the music ye'd get, mates, would be the clank of chains.' 'No port for me!' said Toole. 'I'm for kaping on the say, and being found in a situation of disthress.' 'We must agree to one yarn, and stick to it. What about the lady?' said Dabb. 'Do she know what's happened?' said Maul. 'How it came about, I mean? Then she couldn't say nothing agin our yarn.' 'Tell'e what, my lads,' said the boatswain, looking thoughtfully around him, 'I'm not at all sure that the right tack don't lie in our up and telling the truth, explaining how we was exasperated, and proving that the deaths was accidental.' 'You're a-going to prove nothing accidental out of that bloke's knife,' said Dabb, with a dry, uncomfortable laugh, nodding at Toole. 'As good an accident as Maul's murtherous belaying-pin, and be damned to ye!' exclaimed the Irishman. 'Brothers, I'm thinking Joe there would have me be the only hanged man of this company. Is that because I'm a furriner?' His eyes, fiercely squinting, met in Dabb's hot face. The seamen began to cut up tobacco, and then they lurched to the galley to light their pipes. The boatswain, pipe in mouth, stood in the waist, looking round him and aloft. The little ship lay nearly becalmed. The sails swayed idly, fanning sweet draughts athwartships. The boatswain walked to the binnacle, and said, after looking at the card: 'There's no call now, Mike, to keep her heading for the Equator. I'm for giving my stern to this here boiling.' 'What's settled?' said Scott. 'Nothing.' 'I don't see,' said the man irritably, 'how anything's to be settled in this here roasting heat, and them two bodies side by side there. Him in the cabin's alone enough to take the curl out of a man's spirit. To think of him, with half a fathom of death, blue as ink, across his brow, and himself a-walking these very decks but just a little while gone! Three! It's too many!' 'One was the Dutchman's job,' answered the boatswain. 'But see here! Are ye afraid?' 'Afraid o' what?' 'Well, only that you're talking as if the ghosts of them bodies had jockeyed the yard-arms of your mind, and was close reefing your intellect.' 'I don't like dead bodies,' said Scott; 'and of all the dead bodies a-going,' he added, with a countenance of gloomy ferocity, 'the least I like is murdered bodies. Why don't ye get 'em cleared out overboard, Jim, and sweeten the little hooker? Do human blood smell? Something that my nose never tasted afore came along not long since in a breath o' wind.' The boatswain went to the tarpaulin, pulled it aside, and examined the two dead faces. 'Dead they are,' said he, with a shiver of sick disgust.