The Story of Paul Jones. Alfred Henry Lewis
aids in bringing the corpse on deck. As the body slips from the grating into the sea, a thirty-two pound shot at the heels, the cook laughs overboard at the sharks, still hanging, like hounds upon a scent, to the brig’s wake.
“Ye’ll have to dive for the skipper, lads!” sings out the cook.
Offended by this ribaldry, first mate Jack Paul is on the brink of striking the cook down with a belaying pin. For his own nerves are a-jangle, and that misplaced merriment rasps. It is the look in the man’s face which stays his hand.
“Ye’ll be right!” cries the cook, as though replying to something in the eye of first mate Jack Paul. “Don’t I know it? It is I who’ll follow the skipper! I’ll just go sew my own hammock, and have it ready, shot and all.”
As the cook starts for the galley, a maniac yell is heard from the forecastle. At that, he pauses, sloping his ear to listen.
“I’ll have company,” says he.
First the cook; then the mates; then seven of the crew. One after the other, they follow a thirty-two pound shot over the side; for after the Captain’s death the sailors lose their horror of the plague-killed ones, and sew them up and slip them into the sea as readily as though they are bags of bran. The worst is that a fashion of dull panic takes them, and they refuse their duty. There is no one to command, they say; and, since there can be no commands, there can be no duty. With that they hang moodily about the capstan, or sulk in their bunks below.
First mate Jack Paul takes the wheel, rather than leave the King George’s Packet to con itself across the ocean. As he is standing at the wheel trying to make a plan to save the brig and himself, he observes a sailor blundering aft. The man dives below, and the next moment, through the open skylights, first mate Jack Paul hears him rummaging the Captain’s cabin. In a trice, he lashes the wheel, and slips below on the heels of the sailor. As he surmises, the man is at the rum. Without word spoken, he knocks the would-be rum guzzler over, and then kicks him up the companion way to the deck.
Pausing only to stick a couple of pistols in his belt, first mate Jack Paul follows that kicked seaman with a taste for rum. He walks first to the wheel. The wind is steady and light; for the moment the brig will mind itself. Through some impulse he glances over the stern; the sharks are gone. This gives him a thought; he will use the going of the sharks to coax the men.
The five are grouped about the capstan, the one who was struck is bleeding like tragedy. First mate Jack Paul makes them a little speech.
“There are no more to die,” says he. “The called-for eleven are dead, and the sharks no longer follow us. That shows the ship free of menace; we’re all to see England again. And now, mates”—there is that in the tone which makes the five look up—“I’ve a bit of news. From now, until its anchors are down in Whitehaven basin, I shall command this ship.”
“You?” speaks up a big sailor. “You’re no but a boy!”
“I’m man enough to sail the brig to England, and make you work like a dog, you swab!” The look in the eye of first mate Jack Paul, makes the capstan quintette uneasy. He goes on: “Come, my hearties, which shall it be? Sudden death? or you to do your duty by brig and owners? For, as sure as ever I saw the Solway, the first who doesn’t jump to my order, I’ll plant a brace of bullets in his belly!”
And so rebellion ceases; the five come off their gloomings and their grumblings, and spring to their work of sailing the brig. It is labor night and day, however, for all aboard; but the winds blow the fever away, the gales favor them, one and all they seem to have worn out the evil fortune which dogged them out of Kingston. The King George’s Packet comes safe, at the last of it, into Whitehaven—-first mate Jack Paul and his crew of five looking for the lack of sleep like dead folk walking the decks.
Donald, Currie & Beck pay a grateful salvage on brig and cargo to first mate Jack Paul and the five, for bringing home the brig. This puts six hundred pounds into the pockets of first mate Jack Paul, and one-fifth as much into the pockets of each of the five. Then Donald, Currie & Beck have first mate Jack Paul to dinner with the firm.
“We’ve got a ship for ye,” says shipowner Donald, as the wine is being passed. “Ye’re to be Captain.”
“Captain!” repeats first mate Jack Paul. “A ship for me?”
“Who else, then!” returns shipowner Donald. “Ay! it’s the Crantully Castle, four hundred tons, out o’ Plymouth for Bombay. Ye’re to be Captain; besides, ye’re to have a tenth in the cargo. And now if that suits ye, gentlemen”—addressing shipowners Currie & Beck—“let the firm of Donald, Currie & Beck fill up the glasses to the Crantully Castle and its new Captain, Jack Paul.”
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