I watched her, with my head half turned on my shoulder.  Aye, but it thrilled me, the sight of her!  You will call me a romantic young fool, but it was not that.  It was no thrill of desire, no throb of passion for her beauty, though she was fair enough, in all faith, as she stood there in the moonlight.  It was something bigger, something deeper, a wave of sympathy and pity that surged through my being, a feeling I had never before felt during my savage young life.  A pretty pass, you say, when the ignorant foc’sle Jack pities the captain’s wife?  Aye, but the very beasts of the field might have pitied the wife of Yankee Swope.

Her body seemed so slender and childlike.  Too fine and dainty to hold the woe of a hell-ship, and, Heaven knew, what private sorrow besides.  She did not know I was observing her, or else her great trouble caused her to forget my presence, for she suddenly buried her face in her hands, and her shoulders commenced to heave.  It stabbed me to the quick, the sight of that noiseless grief.  My eyelids smarted, and my throat bulged uncomfortably.  What was her trouble?  Swope?  Had he hurt her?  Was the talk I had heard at the Swede’s correct, did that black devil beat the lady?  My hands grasped the wheel spokes fiercely, as though I had Swope’s sleek throat between my fingers.

I heard Mister Lynch coming aft.  I thought the lady would not wish him to see her weeping, and since she did not seem to hear the approach, I called softly to her, “Lady!  They come!”

She straightened, and, after a second, came swiftly to me.  She bent her face within the narrow radius of the binnacle lights, and her eyes looked straight into mine.  Aye, and the misery and suffering I saw in those great eyes!

“God bless you, boy,” she whispered.  “You are his friend?  Tell him I come forward in the morning.  Tell him—­for my sake—­as he loves his life—­to look behind him when he walks in the dark!”

With that she turned and sped to the hatch, and was gone below.  And up the poop ladder tramped Lynch, with the two tradesmen following him.

I have mentioned these two familiars of the second mate before, and I had better explain them.

The Golden Bough carried neither junior officers, nor bo’suns, an unusual circumstance, considering the size and character of her crews.  Instead, she carried two sailmakers and two carpenters, and these tradesmen lived by themselves in the round-house, ate aft at a special table, and, save when emergency work prevented, stood watch and watch.  They stood their night watches aft, with the officer on deck.  This arrangement—­unique in all my sea experience—­provided three men, awake, armed and handy, throughout the night.  It worried us a good deal, this arrangement, when, in due time, we began to talk of mutiny.

But I was not talking, or even thinking, of mutiny this night, or for many nights.  Nothing was further from my thoughts.  Mutiny is a serious business, a hanging business, the business of scoundrels, or the last resort of desperate men.  I knew the consequences of mutiny, so did the others, squareheads and stiffs, and we had not been sufficiently maltreated to make us ripe for such an undertaking.