The dog at this moment came out of the cabin and stood with his fore feet on the plank at the coaming, staring at his master. He seemed to plead. The human spirit could not be more eloquent in the gaze; but the captain did not heed him, for just then the man who had been sent to fetch the Frenchman was coming aft, shoulder to shoulder with the Frenchman himself. The men forgot to scrub; the head pump ceased to gush; the boatswain left off conjuring and damning. All eyes were turned aft. The silence of a moment fell upon the ship, and nothing broke it but the low growling of the Newfoundland. The Frenchman, fresh from the forecastle, was ghastly pale; his walk was defiant; when abreast of the main-hatchway he came more quickly than his companion, who stopped. He walked up close to the boatswain of the barque and said, in his native tongue: "Well!" The other dropped his arms; his hands were clenched, his eyes charged with that deadly cold light of hate which is more dangerous and fearful than the flame of fury. He spoke slowly in French, and what he said was this: "You did not drown yourself, I see, after assassinating my brother." "You lie in your throat! I sprang to save my life. Your brother is a live man for me." "Liar, and villain, and execrable coward!" He stepped to the rail and said to the men, in French of course--but you shall be told what he said: "The assassin is in this ship. He pretends that he sprang for his life; he killed my brother, our navigator, and would have consigned us, helpless, to the desolation of the sea." He returned, and was followed by a howl of passion from the boat alongside. All in a minute, and just as the man was posting himself again in dramatic attitude close to the murderer, the huge Newfoundland, with an indescribable roar of rage, sprang with the whole weight of his body upon the French mate, and bore him to the deck with a thump of lead, like the fall of a twelve-pounder ball, and they thought that the brute's teeth had met in the wretch's throat. Hardy and the captain made a rush and dragged the animal off the fallen man, and the captain, grasping the creature by the coat of his neck, hauled him, growling fiercely, to the companion, and drove him below. The man rose; his nose was bleeding, and after he had run the length of his sleeve along it his face looked like a decapitated head placed on the upright body it had been struck from. "I want to swing my yards," said Captain Layard. "I've been hove to all night through you. Take that man away; I don't parley-vous myself, and don't follow your talk. He'll navigate you home; he looks a good navigator." And he smiled with some sense of superiority of meaning, which made his face fitter for comedy than for the tragedy of this passage. The French boatswain swept his hand with an infuriate motion toward the rail. "If I go with this man he will kill me," said the blood-stained French mate.