Carter whistled low.

“There’s a pair of you I can’t make out,” he called back, hurrying over the side.

Shaw took this opportunity to approach.  Beginning with hesitation:  “A word with you, sir,” the mate went on to say he was a respectable man.  He delivered himself in a ringing, unsteady voice.  He was married, he had children, he abhorred illegality.  The light played about his obese figure, he had flung his mushroom hat on the deck, he was not afraid to speak the truth.  The grey moustache stood out aggressively, his glances were uneasy; he pressed his hands to his stomach convulsively, opened his thick, short arms wide, wished it to be understood he had been chief-officer of home ships, with a spotless character and he hoped “quite up to his work.”  He was a peaceable man, none more; disposed to stretch a point when it “came to a difference with niggers of some kind—­they had to be taught manners and reason” and he was not averse at a pinch to—­but here were white people—­gentlemen, ladies, not to speak of the crew.  He had never spoken to a superior like this before, and this was prudence, his conviction, a point of view, a point of principle, a conscious superiority and a burst of resentment hoarded through years against all the successive and unsatisfactory captains of his existence.  There never had been such an opportunity to show he could not be put upon.  He had one of them on a string and he was going to lead him a dance.  There was courage, too, in it, since he believed himself fallen unawares into the clutches of a particularly desperate man and beyond the reach of law.

A certain small amount of calculation entered the audacity of his remonstrance.  Perhaps—­it flashed upon him—­the yacht’s gentry will hear I stood up for them.  This could conceivably be of advantage to a man who wanted a lift in the world.  “Owner of a yacht—­badly scared—­a gentleman—­money nothing to him.”  Thereupon Shaw declared with heat that he couldn’t be an accessory either after or before the fact.  Those that never went home—­who had nothing to go to perhaps—­he interjected, hurriedly, could do as they liked.  He couldn’t.  He had a wife, a family, a little house—­paid for—­with difficulty.  He followed the sea respectably out and home, all regular, not vagabonding here and there, chumming with the first nigger that came along and laying traps for his betters.

One of the two flare bearers sighed at his elbow, and shifted his weight to the other foot.

These two had been keeping so perfectly still that the movement was as startling as if a statue had changed its pose.  After looking at the offender with cold malevolence, Shaw went on to speak of law-courts, of trials, and of the liberty of the subject; then he pointed out the certitude and the inconvenience of being found out, affecting for the moment the dispassionateness of wisdom.

“There will be fifteen years in gaol at the end of this job for everybody,” said Shaw, “and I have a boy that don’t know his father yet.  Fine things for him to learn when he grows up.  The innocent are dead certain here to catch it along with you.  The missus will break her heart unless she starves first.  Home sold up.”