“He made a great fight,” I answered, “but he got a clip on the head from a handspike. What did these fellows fire their ship for?”
“Just to take this one so no one will recognize them,” answered the old man.
“And us?” asked Brown, “what will they do with us?”
“We’ll have to go the way Garnett went, I guess,” gasped Crojack, “though I wouldn’t mind it so much if it wasn’t for those poor women. Mrs. Waters got a bullet meant for me. She won’t live till morning. Shot through the breast--”
“But Miss Waters?” I managed to get out in a whisper.
“Locked in my stateroom and that tall devil has the key.”
What my thoughts were when I realized the position of the woman I loved I can hardly remember.
I am a plain sailor-man, and, perhaps, a rough one. But I believe my skin is no thicker than most men’s.
Now, when I look back on that time and remember what I went through, I try to think if it would have been any better for the people who look down on me, or if I would have been a better man had I acted differently.
I’m not a man to cry out against the rulings of a fate I’ve fought against with all my power. If I’m looked down upon as an untrustworthy man, I’m willing to take my rating accordingly. I know I’m shunned and called a pirate by some, but I still feel as if I did about what might have been expected from one in my position and condition, and that I was as near right as possible.
I know, also, that Brown acted from as good an impulse as I did, although it may not have been the same. Had old Captain Crojack lived he would have made it plainer to landsmen why we stood together in the part we played. But I don’t mean to say that the honest old fellow would have joined us.
As it was, before eight bells in the morning Captain Crojack was stark and stiff, lying dead where they had left him on the cabin floor. He had received several wounds after Mrs. Waters was shot, while she was clinging to him.
Not a word of complaint about himself had passed his lips. He died the man he had lived, and the deep-water fleet lost one of the best and bravest men that ever trod a quarter-deck.
At eight bells this convict, Benson, who now had command of the ship with a hundred and more men for her desperate crew, came into the after cabin.