Nighthead slowly complied with the former part of this order; and, in a few moments, every thing was arranged to commence the necessary, and, as it would seem, urgent duty of pumping.  But no man lifted his hand to the laborious employment.  The quick eye of Wilder, who had now taken the alarm, was not slow in detecting this reluctance; and he repeated the order more sternly, calling to two of the seamen, by name, to set the example of obedience.  The men hesitated, giving an opportunity to the mate to confirm them, by his voice, in their mutinous intentions.

“What need of hands to work a pump in a vessel like this?” he said, with a coarse laugh, but in which secret terror struggled strangely with open malice.  “After what we have all seen this night, none here will be amazed, should the vessel begin to spout out the brine like a breathing whale.”

“What am I to understand by this hesitation, and by this language?” said Wilder, approaching Nighthead with a firm step, and an eye too proud to quail before the plainest symptoms of insubordination.  “Is it you, sir, who should be foremost in exertion at a moment like this, who dare to set an example of disobedience?”

The mate recoiled a pace, and his lips moved, still he uttered no audible reply.  Wilder once more bade him, in a calm and authoritative tone, lay his own hands to the brake.  Nighthead then found his voice, in time to make a flat refusal; and, at the next moment, he was felled to the feet of his indignant Commander, by a blow he had neither the address nor the power to resist.  This act of decision was succeeded by one single moment of breathless, wavering silence among the crew; and then the common cry, and the general rush of every man upon our defenceless and solitary adventurer, were the signals that open hostility had commenced.  A shriek from the quarter-deck arrested their efforts; just as a dozen hands were laid violently upon the person of Wilder, and, for the moment, occasioned a truce.  It was the fearful cry of Gertrude, which possessed even the influence to still the savage intentions of a set of beings so rude and so unnurtured as those whose passions had just been awakened into fierce activity.  Wilder was released; and all eyes turned, by a common impulse, in the direction of the sound.

During the more momentous hours of the past night, the very existence of the passengers below had been forgotten by most of those whose duty kept them to the deck.  If they had been recalled at all to the recollection of any, it was at those fleeting moments when the mind of the young mariner, who directed the movements of the ship, found leisure to catch stolen glimpses of softer scenes than the wild warring of the elements that was so actively raging before his eyes.  Nighthead had named them, as he would have made allusion to a part of the cargo, but their fate had little influence on his hardened nature.  Mrs Wyllys and her charge had therefore remained below