“Do you know into what hornet’s nest your stupid people have blundered?  How much d’ye think their lives are worth, just now?  Not a brass farthing if the breeze fails me for another twenty-four hours.  You may well open your eyes.  It is so!  And it may be too late now, while I am arguing with you here.”

He tapped the table with his knuckles, and the glasses, waking up, jingled a thin, plaintive finale to his speech.  Carter stood leaning against the sideboard.  He was amazed by the unexpected turn of the conversation; his jaw dropped slightly and his eyes never swerved for a moment from Lingard’s face.  The silence in the cabin lasted only a few seconds, but to Carter, who waited breathlessly, it seemed very long.  And all at once he heard in it, for the first time, the cabin clock tick distinctly, in pulsating beats, as though a little heart of metal behind the dial had been started into sudden palpitation.

“A gunboat!” shouted Lingard, suddenly, as if he had seen only in that moment, by the light of some vivid flash of thought, all the difficulties of the situation.  “If you don’t go back with me there will be nothing left for you to go back to—­very soon.  Your gunboat won’t find a single ship’s rib or a single corpse left for a landmark.  That she won’t.  It isn’t a gunboat skipper you want.  I am the man you want.  You don’t know your luck when you see it, but I know mine, I do—­and—­look here—­”

He touched Carter’s chest with his forefinger, and said with a sudden gentleness of tone: 

“I am a white man inside and out; I won’t let inoffensive people—­and a woman, too—­come to harm if I can help it.  And if I can’t help, nobody can.  You understand—­nobody!  There’s no time for it.  But I am like any other man that is worth his salt:  I won’t let the end of an undertaking go by the board while there is a chance to hold on—­and it’s like this—­”

His voice was persuasive—­almost caressing; he had hold now of a coat button and tugged at it slightly as he went on in a confidential manner: 

“As it turns out, Mr. Carter, I would—­in a manner of speaking—­I would as soon shoot you where you stand as let you go to raise an alarm all over this sea about your confounded yacht.  I have other lives to consider—­and friends—­and promises—­and—­and myself, too.  I shall keep you,” he concluded, sharply.

Carter drew a long breath.  On the deck above, the two men could hear soft footfalls, short murmurs, indistinct words spoken near the skylight.  Shaw’s voice rang out loudly in growling tones: 

“Furl the royals, you tindal!”