He gripped the Irishman by the shoulder.
“There’s some say this is the last voyage
of White Henshaw, but me an’ some of the rest,
we know different. He can’t leave the sea,
which means that he won’t take us out of hell.
Now, talk straight. You stood up to McTee; would
you stand up to Henshaw?”
Harrigan muttered after a moment of thought:
“I suppose this is mutiny, bos’n?”
“Aye, but I’m safe in talkin’ it.
White Henshaw trusts me, he does, because I’ve
sold my soul to him. If you was to go an’
tell nun what I’ve said, he’d laugh at
you an’ say you was tryin’ to incite discontent.
What’s it goin’ to be, Harrigan? Will
you join me an’ the rest who can set you free
an’ make a man of you, or will you stay by McTee
and White Henshaw and that devil Campbell?”
“How could you set me free?”
“One move—altogether—in
the night—we’d have the ship for our
own, an’ we could beach her and take to the
shore at any place we pleased.”
Harrigan repeated: “One move—altogether—in
the night! I don’t like it, bos’n.
I’ll stand up to my man foot to foot an’
hand to hand, but for strikin’ at him in the
dark—I can’t do it.”
He caught the sound of Hovey’s gritting teeth.
“Think it over,” persisted the bos’n.
“We need you, Harrigan, but if you don’t
join, we’ll help McTee and Henshaw and Campbell
to make life hell for you.”
“I’ve thought it over. I don’t
like the game. This mutiny at night—it’s
like hittin’ a man who’s down.”
“That’s final?”
“It is.”
“Then God help you, Harrigan, for you ain’t
the man I took you for.”
He rose and left Harrigan to the dark, which now lay
so thick over the sea that he could only dimly make
out the black, wallowing length of the ship.
After a time, he went into the dingy forecastle and
stretched out on his bunk. Some of the sailors
were already in bed, propping their heads up with
brawny, tattooed arms while they smoked their pipes.
For a time Harrigan pondered the mutiny, glancing at
the stolid faces of the smokers and trying to picture
them in action when they would steal through the night
barefooted across the deck—some of them
with bludgeons, others with knives, and all with a
thirst for murder.
Sleep began to overcome him, and he fought vainly
against it. In a choppy sea the bows of a ship
make the worst possible bed, for they toss up and
down with sickening rapidity and jar quickly from side
to side; but when a vessel is plowing through a long-running
ground swell, the bows of the ship move with a sway
more soothing than the swing of a hammock in a wind.
Under these circumstances Harrigan was lulled to sleep.
He woke at length with a consciousness, not of a light
shining in his face, but of one that had just been
flashed across his eyes. Then a guarded voice
said: “He’s dead to the world; he
won’t hear nothin’.”
