The word was passed, and the Frenchman, with the aspect of a pirate in a boy's book, rose through the scuttle as the boat came alongside. The man who had steered her scrambled into the mizzen-chains and sprang on to the quarter-deck with a salute of French courtesy. He was close-shaven and dark, habited in loose blue breeches and a jumper, and looked a good sailor spite his nationality, that was as marked in gesture and bearing as though branded on his brow. "Can I speak to the captain?" said he, looking from Hardy to the skipper. His broken English was good. "Glad you speak my tongue," said the captain. "What do you want?" "I have served in American ships and can speak English," answered the man. "I am brother of the captain of that barque. He was stabbed last night and is dead. Our second mate, too, is dead. The first mate is missing. I'll swear he killed my poor brother, and then drowned himself. We are without a navigator. What are we to do?" "You shall have a navigator," exclaimed Captain Layard, and he looked toward the forecastle, but the Frenchman had disappeared. The man bowed and said, "It was a cold-blooded assassination. They had been quarrelling all the voyage. The villain chose the right moment, and the sea is easier than the guillotine." "I saw your captain fall," said Hardy, "and the man that killed him is aboard us." The fellow started, and so did his eyeballs in their sockets as he flashed them eagerly and fiercely along the decks where the sailors were scrubbing, and the boatswain encouraging them with the pleasant promptings of the British forecastle: "Scrub it out of 'em, my lads. D'ye want to drown the ship, you sojer? Slap it along the lee-coaming and be damned to you, Dick! Ain't it as thick as yer eyebrows there? Hurry up, hurry up with them buckets. Are we a hexcavator with the steam turned off?" "A hand fetch that Frenchman out of the fok'sle and bring him aft," shouted Hardy. "What do you mean to do with him?" asked the captain. "I will call the crew together and consider," answered the man with a hideously significant glance at the main yard-arm. "If you hang him," said the captain, "who'll navigate you?" The fellow folded his arms tightly upon his breast and sank his head, sending a level look of patient hate through his eyelashes toward the forecastle. "What's your rating aboard your ship?" inquired the captain. "Boatswain, sir," was the answer, and the man did not turn his head to say it.