For my own part, it seemed to me as unreal as a nightmare that Captain Joseph Whidden actually had been shot dead by a band of Arab pirates. I was bewildered--indeed, stunned--by the incredible suddenness of the calamity. It was so complete, so appallingly final! To me, a boy still in his 'teens, that first intimate association with violent death would have been in itself terrible, and I keenly felt the loss of our chief mate. But Captain Whidden to me was far more than master of the ship. He had been my father's friend since long before I was born; and from the days when I first discriminated between the guests at my father's house, I had counted him as also a friend of mine. Never had I dreamed that so sad an hour would darken my first voyage.
Kipping, on the other hand, and Davie Paine and the carpenter seemed actually well pleased with what had happened. They lolled around with an air of exasperating superiority when they saw any of the rest of us looking at them; and now and then they exchanged glances that I was at a loss to understand until all at once a new thought dawned on me: since the captain and the first mate were dead, the command of the ship devolved upon Mr. Falk, the second mate.
No wonder that Kipping and Davie and the carpenter and all the rest of that lawless clique were well pleased. No wonder that old Bill Hayden and some of the others, for whom Kipping and his friends had not a particle of use were downcast by the prospect.
I was amazed at my own stupidity in not realizing it before, and above all else I now longed to talk with someone whom I could trust--Roger Hamlin by preference; as second choice, my friend the cook. But for the time being I was disappointed in this. Almost immediately Mr. Falk summoned all hands aft.
"Men," he said, putting on a grave face that seemed to me assumed for the occasion, "men, we've come through a dangerous time, and we are lucky to have come alive out of the bad scrape that we were in. Some of us haven't come through so well. It's a sad thing for a ship to lose an officer, and it is twice as sad to lose two fine officers like Captain Whidden and Mr. Thomas. I'll now read the service for the burial of the dead, and after that I'll have something more to say to you."