“If they want me,” said I sorrowfully, “they can find me down below,” and back I went and sat me in the cabin, prepared for the manacles. CHAPTER X THE STRUGGLE IN THE CABIN, AND AN EERIE SOUND OF RUNNING WATER The place stank with bilge and the odour of an ill-trimmed lamp smoking from a beam; the fragments of the skipper's supper were on the table, with a broken quadrant; rats scurried and squealed in the bulkheads, and one stared at me from an open locker, where lay a rum-bottle, while beetles and slaters travelled along the timbers. But these things compelled my attention less than the skylights that were masked internally by pieces of canvas nailed roughly on them. They were not so earlier in the evening; it must have been done after I had gone to sleep, and what could be the object? That puzzled me extremely, for it must have been the same hand that had extinguished all the deck and mast lights, and though black was my crime darkness was unnecessary to my betrayal. I waited with a heart like lead. I heard the boats swung up on the davits, the squeak of the falls, the tread of the seamen, the voice of Risk in an unusually low tone. In the bows in a little I heard the windlass click and the chains rasp in the hawse-holes; we were lifting the anchor. For a moment hope possessed me. If we were weighing anchor then my arrest was not imminent at least; but that consolation lasted briefly when I thought of the numerous alternatives to imprisonment in Blackness. We were under weigh again; there was a heel to port, and a more rapid plop of the waters along the carvel planks. And then Risk and his mate came down. I have seldom seen a man more dashed than the skipper when he saw me sitting waiting on him, clothed and silent. His face grew livid; round he turned to Murchison and hurried him with oaths to come and clap eyes on this sea-clerk. I looked for the officer behind them, but they were alone, and at that I thought more cheerfully I might have been mistaken about the night's curious proceedings. “Anything wrang?” said Risk, affecting nonchalance now that his spate of oaths was by, and he pulled the rum out of the locker and helped himself and his mate to a swingeing caulker. “Oh, nothing at all,” said I, “at least nothing that I know of, Captain Risk. And are we--are we--at Halifax already?” “What do you mean?” said he. And then he looked at me closely, put out the hand unoccupied by his glass and ran an insolent dirty finger over my new-clipped mole. “Greig, Greig,” said he, “Greig to a hair! I would have the wee shears to that again, for its growin'.” “You're a very noticing man,” said I, striking down his hand no way gently, and remembering that he had seen my scissors when I emerged from the Borrowstouness close after my own barbering.