They all crept away to the far end of the hold, and instead of sitting and yarning and using their wonderful oaths as usual, they sat smoking, deep in thought. I say _wonderful_ oaths, because they were connoisseurs in such matters. As a dog’s wagging tail expresses more truth and gratitude than all human language, so those oaths expressed the true depth of their feelings.
Next morning Ranjo missed his rough customers: they were hidden from the blazing sun, all down in the hulk’s gloomy depth. There they sat on their old barrels, holding a solemn council as to what was best to be done about the girl who had sought their protection.
Uncle Sam pulled his whiskers. The rays of sunlight streaming through the port-hole just above his head revealed his worried face and the grizzled physiognomies of the sunburnt men grouped about him.
“I vote that we make her our valet de chambre,” said the Dude, who had arrived at Nuka Hiva six months before with a bullet-hole in his coat-tails.
“What!” ejaculated twenty deep bass voices.
“I reckon you wants to send the lot of us to hell,” said another, who spat through the port-hole with wonderful precision and disgust as he continued: “What would old Benbow say if he heard we’d had his daughter down here, with coves like us?”
“Why, bless me soul,” said another, as he swiftly spat and crossed his comrade’s last stream of tobacco juice on its way through the port-hole, “Benbow would say that one of us” (here he lowered his voice and looked in the direction of Waylao’s chamber) “was the father of the kid. Where’d be the sprees when Benbow returned from his next voyage? No more rum, I’ll bet, eh?”
“You’re about right, I reckon,” murmured the young sailors who were busy in the corner making tobacco-pouches out of the tough skin of an albatross’s feet.
The Dude from the London Stock Exchange said: “What a fuss to make over a girl being in the family way.” Then he went on carefully cutting out a new pair of paper cuffs, which he always wore to impress the skippers of the outgoing schooners, who might give him a passage to the “no-extradition” colonies of South America—on tick.
Bill Grimes put his spoke in and capped the lot. Looking up at the rows of grim faces, he gave a little embarrassed cough, then said: “It’s my way of finking that the gal oughter git married to some ’onourable cove who would look after ’er, make ’er ’appy.” Rubbing his scrubby chin fiercely, he continued: “Gawd! ain’t she ’andsome!”