“They must ha’ thought better on’t for some reason or another,” said the Jack, “and gone down.”

“A four-oared galley, did you say?” said I.

“A four,” said the Jack, “and two sitters.”

“Did they come ashore here?”

“They put in with a stone two-gallon jar, for some beer.  I’d ha’been glad to pison the beer myself,” said the Jack, “or put some rattling physic in it.”

“Why?”

“I know why,” said the Jack.  He spoke in a slushy voice, as if much mud had washed into his throat.

“He thinks,” said the landlord:  a weakly meditative man with a pale eye, who seemed to rely greatly on his Jack:  “he thinks they was, what they wasn’t.”

“I knows what I thinks,” observed the Jack.

“You thinks Custum ’Us, Jack?” said the landlord.

“I do,” said the Jack.

“Then you’re wrong, Jack.”

“Am I!”

In the infinite meaning of his reply and his boundless confidence in his views, the Jack took one of his bloated shoes off, looked into it, knocked a few stones out of it on the kitchen floor, and put it on again.  He did this with the air of a Jack who was so right that he could afford to do anything.

“Why, what do you make out that they done with their buttons then, Jack?” asked the landlord, vacillating weakly.

“Done with their buttons?” returned the Jack.  “Chucked ’em overboard.  Swallered ’em.  Sowed ’em, to come up small salad.  Done with their buttons!”

“Don’t be cheeky, Jack,” remonstrated the landlord, in a melancholy and pathetic way.

“A Custum ’Us officer knows what to do with his Buttons,” said the Jack, repeating the obnoxious word with the greatest contempt, “when they comes betwixt him and his own light.  A Four and two sitters don’t go hanging and hovering, up with one tide and down with another, and both with and against another, without there being Custum ’Us at the bottom of it.”  Saying which he went out in disdain; and the landlord, having no one to reply upon, found it impracticable to pursue the subject.

This dialogue made us all uneasy, and me very uneasy.  The dismal wind was muttering round the house, the tide was flapping at the shore, and I had a feeling that we were caged and threatened.  A four-oared galley hovering about in so unusual a way as to attract this notice, was an ugly circumstance that I could not get rid of.  When I had induced Provis to go up to bed, I went outside with my two companions (Startop by this time knew the state of the case), and held another council.  Whether we should remain at the house until near the steamer’s time, which would be about one in the afternoon; or whether we should put off early in the morning; was the question we discussed.  On the whole we deemed it the better course to lie where we were, until within an hour or so of the steamer’s time, and then to get out in her track, and drift easily with the tide.  Having settled to do this, we returned into the house and went to bed.