By and by he came to me where, overcome by a wave of nausea, I had sat down on the deck with my back against the bulwark. "Dey ain't none of 'em Kipping," he said grimly. Then he saw my bleeding shoulder and instantly got down beside me. "You jest let dis yeh ol' nigger took a hand," he cried. "Ah's gwine fix you all up. You jest come along o' me!" And helping me to my feet, he led me to the galley, where once more he was supreme and lawful master. In no time at all he had a kettle of water on the stove, in which the coals of a good fire still lingered, and with a clean cloth he washed my wound so gently that I scarcely could believe his great, coarse hands were actually at work on me. "Dah you is," he murmured, bending over the red, shallow gash that the bullet had cut, "dah you is. Don' you fret. Ah's gwine git you all tied up clean an' han'some, yass, sah." The yells and cries of every description alarmed and agitated us both. It was far from reassuring to know that that mob of natives was ranging the ship at will. "Ef you was to ask me," Frank muttered, rolling his eyes till the whites gleamed starkly, "Ah's gwine tell you dis yeh ship is sottin', so to speak, on a bar'l of gunpowder. Yass, sah!" An islander uttered a shrill catcall just outside the galley and thrust his head and half his naked body in the door. He vanished again almost instantly, but Frank jumped and upset the kettle. "Yass, sah, you creepy ol' sarpint," he gasped. "Yass, sah, we's sottin' on a bar'l of gunpowder." I am convinced, as I look back on that night from the pinnacle of more than half a century, that not one man in ten thousand has ever spent one like it. Allied with a horde whose language we could not speak, we had boarded our own ship and now--mutineers, pirates, or loyal mariners, according to your point of view--we shared her possession with a mob of howling heathens whose goodwill depended on the whim of the moment, and who might at any minute, by slaughtering us out of hand, get for their own godless purposes the ship and all that was in her. The cook cautiously fingered the keen edge of his cleaver as we looked out and saw that dawn was brightening in the east. "Dat Falk, he say he gwine git us yet," the cook muttered. "Maybe so--maybe not. Maybe we ain't gwine last as long as dat." "All hands aft!" Frank and I looked at each other. The galley was as safe and comfortable as any place aboard ship and we were reluctant to leave it. "_All hands aft!_" came the call again. "Ah reckon," Frank said thoughtfully, "me and you better be gwine. When Mistah Hamlin he holler like dat, he want us." Light had come with amazing swiftness, and already we could see the deck from stem to stern without help of the torches, which still flamed and sent thin streamers of smoke drifting into the mist.