WO weeks later life was still unchanged on the Sally Martin, though I had acquired wisdom with every passing hour, and the chest in Williams's cabin had a new lock.
But that was putting new bolts on the stable when the mare was gone. I had a dozen bottles stowed when the new lock appeared.
Williams said nothing. He had other things to think of, and not the least was a false log into which I peeped from time to time. Precious little good wasting all that time imagining weather and knots from Singapore when he had no clearance papers. But it was his neck the gibbet beckoned for. Not mine. I'd swear I was a pressed man.
I was nearer a mutineer than anything else. Hawkins, too. We were leagued with Davenant. Only Hawkins did not know it. Raikes had gone over to Williams, and carried warnings about us.
Davenant was going to divide the wealth of Grahame of Dakaru among us. He would more willingly have divided his sheet to make us a funeral shroud, only it would have taken more than one sheet to encircle Hawkins.
Understand me; Davenant was not so much of a fool as he may appear. I had, with the few well-chosen words already set down, broken off his relations with Raikes, much to the regret of both.
Davenant could not trust him longer, and Raikes might call me—as he did—a liar, a black liar, a thrice doubly damned liar; but that Raikes had not kept his secret was evident in my repetition of it.
It happened that Davenant was, in addition to having some hate of Williams, afraid of him. When a pirate and a gentleman sit down to a roast fowl, there is no doubt as to who will do the carving. Davenant felt himself the gentleman.
Hurricane Williams was about the last man he would have picked for the voyage, because at Dakaru he thought there was a fine estate and much wealth; and some people feel that it is better to fail than to share. The discovery that it was Williams, and not some obscure sailing-master by the name of Moore, caused Davenant to be melancholy and wish for a way to get clear from what by common report was an exceedingly dangerous man.
Common report is as much to be trusted as an heir's tears, though in his case there was some convincing evidence. The man who once blew over a cliff and landlocked the gunboat of a very proud European power is likely to have a reputation. Williams had done that, and some other things that made the Germans want his head. In those days the Germans wanted almost everything in the South Seas; since then the want has grown, also diminished.
Anyway, Williams was known as a pirate; and Davenant must have felt pretty much like one who fishes for rock-cod and finds himself in possession of a shark.
The belief that Raikes was something of a navigator had encouraged a mutual understanding. The fact that Raikes knew what Davenant was up to at Dakaru assisted in the understanding. What would ultimately have happened to Raikes had best be left to the imagination, for he was only an ignorant, greedy fellow.
About the time that a new lock appeared on the chest in Williams's cabin a thing took place that rather gave coloring to certain hints I had been dropping, when chance offered, into Davenant's ear, i.e. that I hated Williams. What I really hated was not to find out why Davenant and his sinister niece were laying so mysteriously their course for Grahame's “empire.” Miss Davenant had retired into incommunicable reserve. She spoke and passed, or passed without speaking.
We ran into a bit of good weather; and the sun being warm, the wind steady, and Hawkins having the wheel and the deck to himself, I approached, gave him what was left in a bottle, and we fell into an argument about something or other. There was a woman in it, I know. There is a woman in all the troubles that come to men.
Davenant came up and took a seat by the rail, but we did not notice him. We did not notice much of anything, and the Sally Martin, being always up to something, veered from her course and was in a fair way to go stern on when Williams appeared.
Without warning, without a word, his iron fist crashed on Hawkins's head, and the ox-like man went to the deck with a grunt. Williams swung his weight to the wheel and brought her around, then gave me the helm and such a look as made shivers ripple from neck to heel.
Hawkins got up dizzily, ragefully, saying something about no man could treat him like that. Williams—braced, feet apart, knees slightly bent and neck drawn in—waited.